Cut out the jail. Put the exact same dollar amount towards universal health, food, income, and education programs.
Let's see which one produces a healthier outcome for our society as a whole.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/la-spending-837000...
> Most of the units are studios or one-bedroom apartments. The audit found 14% of the units build exceeded $700,000 each, and one project in pre-development is estimated to cost almost $837,000 per unit.
So it's one unit that doesn't exist that might cost $837,000, not the average unit. Indeed, the average unit is nowhere near that.
Edit: For comparison, it costs $100k per year to support each prisoner in California's system[1]. Even if the average unit costs $400k (which still seems high), it pays for itself after less than half a decade.
Those $700k units that LA built will also require constant repairs, and the inhabitants will still need food, medical care, counseling, etc.
I wouldn't start by saying that the US prison system takes care of any inmate's needs, even if they spend a fabulously large amount of money seemingly earmarked for that task.
Long term, permanent housing is always going to beat incarceration, when we're talking about the same population. It might cost more at first, but those costs are overwhelmingly fixed and then much smaller future variables. The variables that aren't covered (food, medical care, etc., as you've correctly observed) can often be transferred from carceral programs. Fewer people in prisons also means less money spent on maintaining the physical and human plant; some 20% of the individual costs listed above.
Assuming a $700k unit has an estimated lifespan of 50 years. That's $14k/year, we could say $20k/year with a generous maintenance allowance over the life of the home.
So in this example that's $80k/yr remaining for food, utilities, care, etc.
5 years is indeed aggressive, and probably unrealistic. My goal was to show that even with contrived (and conservative) numbers these programs look great; with longer outlooks, they look fantastic.
The results have been abysmal.
But whenever I wait for the bus at 3rd and Pine (we did on Saturday), I don't see much hope like you do.
But is it a solution?
If Andre gets out of prison and goes back to stealing, then that process may well have wasted more money than many social programs for the exact same outcome. Imprisoning people is really expensive.
If Andre never gets out of prison at all, then we're committing to indefinitely spending a ton of money on him for the rest of his life, which also is not an amazing outcome. And that's only a theoretical possibility anyway, selling stolen goods (even habitually) is probably not going to get you a life-sentence in prison.
I think people have this perspective on incarceration that it's the final catch-all solution, and the reason we avoid it is purely compassion. And compassion is part of it, sure, but also if prison sentences don't reduce recidivism, then they're not a working solution. You should look at prison recidivism rates and apply the same level of skepticism and hold prison spending to the same standards that you apply to social programs and public housing. You should have the same expectations for both public housing and for what is essentially a much more expensive form of "coerced housing".
Asking how far we should go to reform someone before we give up and incarcerate is kind of begging the question -- it assumes that incarceration is always solution that just blanketly works and the only reason we avoid it is out of compassion and morality. In reality, incarceration is just another tool in the toolbox, and sometimes it might solve a problem, and sometimes it won't -- sometimes it's a complete waste of time and money.
What is the alternative? Just let them keep taking dumps on society until they finally go too far and bash someone's head in with a baseball bat (like that poor girl in Belltown a few months ago)? Incarceration shouldn't be the first answer, but it might very well be the tenth or eleventh...if only to actually protect everyone else.
If all your compassion does is allow for someone to destroy themselves (like decriminalize drugs and provide safe places for people to pursue their addictions), then is that the alternative?
Again, this assumes incarceration works, which you don't get to just assume.
If someone comes out of prison and then bashes someone's head in with a bat, then the incarceration didn't work. You're still looking at this from a perspective of, "we have an answer that will work, but we want to avoid it when possible." And that's not the reality, sometimes incarceration doesn't fix the problem.
> What is the alternative? [...] If all your compassion does is allow for someone to destroy themselves (like decriminalize drugs and provide safe places for people to pursue their addictions), then is that the alternative?
I think that part of looking for an alternative should be trying to find out if the alternative produces better results than what we're already doing. If prison doesn't produce lower recidivism rates than social programs, then yeah, obviously the social programs are the correct alternative even if some people take advantage of them -- because we're not looking at a scenario where either system (social programs or prison) has 100% effectiveness at preventing crime.
Let me flip your own question back: if all your cruelty does is drive people into harder crime and more desperate actions when they get out of prison, then is that the alternative? The alternative to social programs is something that is wildly expensive and that is often ineffective at reforming behavior?
You have to look this stuff more pragmatically and less emotionally. We can have a conversation about the ethics of prison, and that can be an important conversation, but it really has nothing to do with the separate question of whether or not prison is practical and cost effective at keeping down crime levels. Both ethics and practicality matter for policy, but they are not dependent variables with each other -- something feeling harsher or crueler to you does not magically mean it works better.
For petty crime like fencing stolen goods, they are looking at a few weeks in jail at most. Not going to change their outlook very much, but will probably discourage them from fencing goods out in the open (at least in Seattle). This focus on petty crime works well for Bellevue (but forces the problem on Seattle).
The current crackdown, the cops aren't arresting anyone for fencing goods even when it's obvious what they are doing. Instead they are just telling them to leave (this happened a few times while we were waiting for the bus at 3rd and Pine a couple of days ago)...not a solution, they will definitely be back.
And yes, if the problem can't be solved locally (too harsh, push the problem somewhere else; too soft, attract more of the problem), why should be in the latter category? Is Seattle just a convenient sacrifice?
Do you know beyond intuition what the stats are on that? If we take an average person and put them in prison for fencing goods, statistically what is the most likely outcome when they come out?
- What are the odds they stop doing this in the open?
- What are the odds they stop doing this entirely?
- What are the odds they move on to something worse? How much worse will it be and are there ways to mitigate that outcome?
- On average, what is the ratio of percent reduction in visible crime to the amount of money we would spend per-person? Are those numbers better/worse than other alternatives that we've looked at?
- Is this a constant across multiple types of crime? Do the numbers become different when we look at petty crime or violent crime?
Have you looked into that stuff, or are you just assuming on intuition that the numbers are good? We're all kind of talking past each other here; I suspect most people on HN know in theory why prisons should work, and I suspect most people know in theory why social programs should work. So explaining the theory is not particularly valuable at this point.
These numbers are really complicated, they're difficult to measure because of confounding variables and implementation details. There are ways of running prisons that make recidivism rates higher or lower, so it's not even an across-the-board single statistic. But that should be the baseline of where any conversation about this stuff starts.
Also, you used "begging the question" properly! I'm weirdly refreshed by that having just seen it misused in another comment.
I'd bet the percentage of people that would rather pay to imprison people, rather than deal with the treatment / relapse loop is at least 25%. Likely even higher if you take it as a percentage of the gainfully employed.
But that logic, anything society accepts is an answer. You could just as easily say that society accepting high crime rates is an answer.
You're right that policies often reflect public opinion, but when we're debating policy ideally the conversation would go deeper than that. Public discussions about policy in the open, on forums, etc, is a big part of how public opinion gets formed, and those discussions should probably dig into underlying goals and identify the costs and benefits of different approaches beyond just checking what the current majority preference is. Things can get a little circular when being popular is the justification for why something is popular.
I see a couple of problems:
- most prison terms are limited (any prison term for petty theft is going to be).
- prisons often release people into the same communities they came out of.
- it is tremendously expensive to even get someone into prison, you have to arrest them and either get them through a trial or at least pay for sentencing if they just plead guilty.
If the entire goal of prison is to separate offenders from society (which could be its own conversation, but whatever, we'll take it for granted that's the goal), we still kind of need to ask if prison is the best way of doing that.
Optimizing for cost is not what you want. The most cost effective way of separating people from society is a summary execution with no trial. Prisons aren't meant to be the cheapest solution, they're meant to be a more humane compromise.
Are jails a cost-effective way of separating people from society, even if we only look at solutions that are at least as humane as prison?
I'm sort of jumping around the main issue, which is that I don't think prisons only exist to separate people from society and I don't think most people think about them that way, not really. I think Camus up-thread is just wrong, prisons are about more than isolation. People think about prisons in terms of punishment/justice, and deterrence, and about organization/holding during trials, and yes, people also think about prisons as a rehabilitation effort.
If you look at prisons only through the lens of "this is where we put people we don't want to be around", then the system kind of stops making sense. It's not optimized for that.
I mean, if nothing else, you really have to grapple with the fact that most people don't get life sentences. If the person being discussed in this thread gets arrested and given 4 months in jail and then comes out back into the same community, then the public housing solution only really needs to keep him off the street for 5 months in order for it to be a cheaper and more effective solution -- unless prison is serving some other set of goals beyond just separating people from society temporarily, unless it's also trying to keep people outside of prison from committing crime, through both deterrence and rehabilitation.
But if you're just worried about removing people from society, prison is an awful way of doing that for low-level offenses; it's both incredibly stressful and cruel for the person being imprisoned, and incredibly expensive, and doesn't actually keep them separated from society for more than a few months to a year.
edit: To elaborate, the "at some point" is like... where a person has to be removed from society because they're an imminent danger to themselves or others.
We'd like our city back please.
The US has a higher incarceration rate than other developed countries, while also maintaining higher crime/violence rates. It doesn't seem to be a good solution to the crime problem. Does Andre get out of prison? What then?
It may be more accurate to say, "At some point incarceration has failed and compassion is the only solution."
Oh, we really suck at this, I admit! First, it should never have gotten to this point, and second, prisons should focus on fixing rather than punishing people. We are in agreement. But I don't think there are many options for Andre at this point (we should have done a better job 15 years ago). Washington state prisons are also a bit more on the reform side than other states in the country.
> It may be more accurate to say, "At some point incarceration has failed and compassion is the only solution."
Compassion should always come first, incarceration is a last ditch effort and means we have basically failed this person.
He either accepts the help again (housing, food, job, education, etc) and actually makes something of himself, or he commits more crimes and goes back to prison. Seems like a fairly straightforward deal to me.
Where is that missing? It is there today. The fact is that society bears the financial burden of someone spending a life in prison (and also the emotional/financial/physical burden of the person's actual crimes). You seem to be dismissing that to make an ideological stance.
That's because the problems are much more systematic and large parts of the population approach the solution with monkey patching. So of course you'd think we've run out of solutions.
So you get a bucket and put it under the dripping hole. The bucket doesn't fix the roof. The bucket will eventually fill up and you'll have to empty it down a drain before trying it again. Again and again. The bucket isn't solving anything, but would you be better off without the bucket? No, the bucket at least keeps your floor dry some of the time. That's better than nothing. Prison is a bucket. Prisons collect criminals for a while until they eventually fill up. But they're better than dumping all those criminals straight into the streets.
Would you like to be committed to a mental institution forever, in that circumstance?
The store has to be able to recuperate the loss there. That means either:
1. Higher prices (and for a region that isn't doing well.. they can't afford it and are pushed futher to steal more to survive)
or
2. The store can't survive in that region (Good bye Target on the south side of chicago.. hello food desert once again..also job losses of people trying to make it legitmately) https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-target-closin...
When you punish someone for shoplifting sufficently enough: That means for the time that they're now occupied they can't shoplift, and others do not see continued shoplifting for them. (This is also how violent crimes work as well..)
Honest question: how do we know that this works? And more importantly, where does incarceration as a deterrent not work (e.g. where are the bounds)? Do you have a source?
Well when they're locked up.. they can't go to walgreens and steal a bucket of tidepods.
Sources: No unfortunately I don't. Most of the articles I've seen on this tend to have a bias against punishment for crime and tend to over inflate "corrupt enforcement". (Rather than to discuss the full situation, statistics and societal cost)
My understanding is that crime is mostly a young person's thing. The older people get the less likely they're to commit crime. Prison as a way of aging people out is effective. At best it can prevent people from falling back with the people who go them in the situation.
This makes sense; younger people tend to be less risk averse. Not sure if “aging people out” is the right solution: people who get out of prison usually have worse prospects than when they go in, so (assuming older people are in fact less likely to commit crime) we’d be trading one social problem for another (health/welfare/homelessness).
Also, from an ethical standpoint, I don’t think I could get behind long incarceration times and strict punishments for petty crimes just to reduce the rate of crime. These are real (young) people with lives that are being upended for some mistakes.
Yes. Consequences are a deterrent. You will never be able to know for sure how many acts of theft weren't carried out because the person decided the reward wasn't work the risk of getting caught and going to jail. It seems self-evident that theft will rise when deterrents are dramatically curtailed. No one was suggesting that the threat of jail/prison would prevent all theft.
>"What's the return on investment for sending someone to jail over diapers stolen from a Walgreens?"
This is intangible. There will never be a satisfactory answer because there are just too many variables. How much theft was prevented by merit of being in jail? Is it possible going to jail made this person re-evaluate their life? Maybe some cashier's life was saved because a confrontation never took place. The theoreticals are endless.
Until they're released. At which point they'll have an even harder time getting a job, they'll be even more alienated and broken, and they'll likely only be able to associate with other criminals. Sounds like a recipe for increasing crime.
> Consequences are a deterrent.
Not really. If your options are "die" or "face potential consequences" you choose the latter every time.
I really doubt that "I don't want to go to prison" is why most people don't commit crime. They don't commit crime because... crime sucks, it's not fun, and it's not really necessary for most people. The people who do crime aren't like "haha they won't prosecute me, sweet, finally I can go commit crimes". They're desperate.
This seems so obvious.
> This is intangible.
Kind of a cop out. The reality is that people who go to prison have an extremely high rate of ending up back in prison, often for even worse crimes.
This doesn't explain vandalism, joyriding, or kleptomania. Additionally, the notion that "it's not really necessary for most people" is true, but misleading. But have you considered that some people realize theft is an easier alternative to being gainfully employed? Why bother putting up with a boss and paying taxes when I can steal a single catalytic converter and make $2K under the table? That's like a month's worth of salary gained in 20 minutes.
>"The people who do crime aren't like "haha they won't prosecute me, sweet, finally I can go commit crimes". They're desperate."
I don't think you have ever met a criminal. Some are desperate, but why can't you recognize that crime is lucrative and a preferable alternative for these people? For lots of people, if they can get away with it, they'll do it. Their conscience doesn't bother them like it would for you and I.
These are pretty minor crimes lol I'll be really happy if we get to a point where we have to worry about these things.
> But have you considered that some people realize theft is an easier alternative to being gainfully employed?
I mean, yes, I've considered it. I dismissed it because it's sort of idiotic. Is it better than working a job with no healthcare, benefits, a minimum wage, and the chance to be fired at any time with no safety nets? Sure, yeah. We should fix that.
> why can't you recognize that crime is lucrative and a preferable alternative for these people?
We both agree that crime is preferable for some people. We just disagree about why.
> Their conscience doesn't bother them like it would for you and I.
Years of living in an abusive society, learning that crime is a survival mechanism, etc, will naturally do that to anyone.
"Pretty minor crimes, lol". I sense you live in a nice area and have lived a sheltered life. You may not have to worry about such things, but plenty of people are not so fortunate. Have you ever had your home broken into? Your family's car stolen and joyridden? I have, multiple times. It's easy to write these things off as minor concerns when it's not happening to you.
Even though fencing shit is exactly the same as many retail jobs, except for the source of the goods
Here's a very relevant paper on the issue, where the researcher concludes a number of suggestions, including "we need to consider ceasing to use prison as punishment" and "we should draw on the research of what we know works to prevent recidivism, especially literacy programs, skills training and GED, as well as educating prisoners to associate’s degree level in higher education and restore financial support for these successful practices": https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258834307_On_the_Ef...
> spending time in jail for... stealing a pack of diapers?
That's disingenuous at best. These people steal hundreds of items and setup tables selling them. This isn't a mother stealing formula or diapers for her child. It's a criminal operation stealing stuff by the trash bag (as we have seen in many videos over the past few years) in cities with very loose theft laws (mostly on the west coast).
I must beg the question, if nothing is being done to address this person's asocial behavior, how on Earth will they become a productive and positive member of society? Many of these people have learned they can get more of what they want by breaking the law than by living within it.
People like me who are gainfully employed, pay taxes, and don't steal look at the lawlessness and genuinely start to wonder why we even bother upholding the social contract when there seems to be no interest in applying it anymore.