At $75,560, Housing a Prisoner in California Now Costs More Than a Year at Harvard (latimes.com) 333
The cost of imprisoning each of California's 130,000 inmates is expected to reach a record $75,560 in the next year, the AP reported. From the article: That's enough to cover the annual cost of attending Harvard University and still have plenty left over for pizza and beer Gov. Jerry Brown's spending plan for the fiscal year that starts July 1 includes a record $11.4 billion for the corrections department while also predicting that there will be 11,500 fewer inmates in four years (alternative source) because voters in November approved earlier releases for many inmates. The price for each inmate has doubled since 2005, even as court orders related to overcrowding have reduced the population by about one-quarter. Salaries and benefits for prison guards and medical providers drove much of the increase. The result is a per-inmate cost that is the nation's highest -- and $2,000 above tuition, fees, room and board, and other expenses to attend Harvard. Since 2015, California's per-inmate costs have surged nearly $10,000, or about 13%. New York is a distant second in overall costs at about $69,000.
we'll pay for prison (Score:5, Insightful)
We'll pay to put people in prison, yet we won't pay to educate people. Maybe it's just me, but perhaps, just perhaps this nation has its priorities backwards.
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Are they suggesting that Harvard students should be housed in California prisons?
Re:we'll pay for prison (Score:4, Funny)
Then they'd refer to it as the slahmah.
Re:we'll pay for prison (Score:5, Interesting)
Are they suggesting that Harvard students should be housed in California prisons?
That wouldn't be a bad idea. A 1978 documentary, Scared Straight! [amzn.to], had a group of juvenile delinquents meet harden convicts who scared the crap out of them to convince that a life of crime doesn't pay. Such an experience for the graduating class of Harvard might convince future Wall Street traders and politicians to be more ethical in their dealings.
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A 1978 documentary, href="http://amzn.to/2sAK1ft">Scared Straight!, had a group of juvenile delinquents meet harden convicts who scared the crap out of them to convince that a life of crime doesn't pay. Such an experience for the graduating class of Harvard might convince future Wall Street traders and politicians to be more ethical in their dealings.
Why? They are not at any measurable risk of going to prison - prison is for the poor or middle class.
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Why? They are not at any measurable risk of going to prison - prison is for the poor or middle class.
Call it sensitivity training then.
Re:we'll pay for prison (Score:5, Informative)
Are they suggesting that Harvard students should be housed in California prisons?
That wouldn't be a bad idea. A 1978 documentary, Scared Straight! [amzn.to], had a group of juvenile delinquents meet harden convicts who scared the crap out of them to convince that a life of crime doesn't pay.
Unfortunately "Scared Straight!" is a textbook case of an idea that sounds good in theory and makes good TV but when you do do proper controlled trials you discover that it is worse than useless: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]
Re:we'll pay for prison (Score:5, Insightful)
If more harvard students went to prison, on the other hand, you can guarantee treatment of prisoners would improve.
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I don't think so. Unless they are massively stupid, Wall Street traders and politicians do not get sent to prison.
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well, they'd get a taste of the diversity that the school constantly crows about.
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Well, the US already spends more than $11000 on average per elementary school student, and more than $12000 on average per secondary school student, more than all but a handful of other nations. The US also has one of the largest percentage of college/university educated adults in the world. US teachers are paid significantly more than OECD average. Some of the students on which we spend the most (inner cities, native Americans) have some of the worst outcomes.
Re:we'll pay for prison (Score:5, Insightful)
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It also gets you sweet lobbying kickbacks from the private prison system. A win-win, except for the people getting fucked over by said system, the taxpayers funding the whole thing, and society in general when people come out more messed up than when they went in.
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What other metric would you use to pay for those prisons? Customer satisfaction?
Re: we'll pay for prison (Score:2, Insightful)
Yep. But the customer is us. Base fees on recidivism.
Re:we'll pay for prison (Score:5, Interesting)
What other metric would you use to pay for those prisons? Customer satisfaction?
How about recidivism rates? Pay a bonus for every prisoner that's released from a prison, every year until they are arrested again or die, whichever comes first.
That would add an incentive for rehabilitation.
Re:we'll pay for prison (Score:5, Funny)
Or just make them get law degrees. Harvard has nearly a 0% recidivism rate; people who go to Harvard almost never go back. :-)
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Because the incentive is to keep the prison full, which costs more taxpayers money, and some companies involved have been found to pay kickbacks to judges who hand out harsh sentences.
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Recidivism rate, after discharge.
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Hotels do the same thing!
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The problem is not the funding. Funding has been going through the roof for 50 years.
Re prisons
1. how about finding other ways to punish besides prison
2. how about decriminalizing drugs, prostitution and gambling.
keep prison for rapists and murders and thieves
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Portugal also has no private prison system.
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The sub-assistant to the assistant vice night dean of the electron subdepartment of the atom department of the molecular department of the physics department needs to hire a third receptionist. God forbid he be asked to share staff with the vice vice morning shift subdean of subtraction.
Most of the money spent at college (Score:5, Funny)
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Actually, as the article states, most of the money goes to prison guards and health care.
What was missed is that the prison guards union is generally considered to be the most powerful political spender in the state. The get what they ask for very routinely. Their pay increases have regularly run way ahead of inflation. Clearly money well spent!
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Why shouldn't we pay them a fraction of a stockbrokers pay? On the other hand why are we paying those stockbrokers so much when it's so much easier to find someone to do that job and they don't need as much training?
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The prison guard unions have funded ballot initiatives to lengthen sentences and send more people to prison. So it isn't just a matter of how much they are paid, but how many of them we need. California has way too many people in prison, and way too many prison guards.
Also, the biggest problem with guard compensation is not salaries but pensions. Pensions are based on "final year salary" so what they do is cram an extra thousand hours of overtime into their last year, wildly inflating their pay, and guar
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It is all about priorities. If you don't pay to put people in prison, you get a pile of dead people. If you don't pay to send people to university, the person just enters the job marker earlier and in general does has better economic statistics.
Re:we'll pay for prison (Score:4, Insightful)
A lot of people in US jails are in for drug related offenses. The US has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world and there is no excuse for that.
Re:we'll pay for prison (Score:4, Insightful)
Or pleading up from actually being innocent.
Bullshit (Score:2)
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Drugs, they've never killed anyone. - Rujiel
Drug Deaths in America Are Rising Faster Than Ever: [nytimes.com] Drug overdose deaths in 2016 most likely exceeded 59,000. This is greater that the peak car crash deaths, HIV deaths, and gun deaths.
Drug related Homicides accounts for more far more Americna deaths any any war. [narconews.com] Thousands are killed in feuds between gangs and dealers looking to expand or protect their drug trade.
People die every day form drug driving. [drugabuse.gov]. I know someone who who was completely totaled just last year
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It's pretty simple really. You can forcibly imprison people, but you can't force them to learn or become productive members of society.
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American style capitalism says everything gets cheaper, better, more efficient through privatization.
Except when it doesn't.
Maybe it time you shook off your irrational fear of "socialism" and let the government take care of a few things that make sense to be handled by the government.
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American style capitalism says everything gets cheaper, better, more efficient through privatization. ... Except when it doesn't.
Aside from the potential for competition, that assumes a that the buyers are somewhat sensitive to changes in price. Under normal circumstances that would be a safe assumption, but when the buyer is the government, and spending other people's money, there is very little price sensitivity on the buyer's side to keep prices in check. The seller, of course, is going to charge whatever they can get away with, and the government has no real incentive to bargain or look for cheaper solutions. The inevitable outco
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How is Socialist Venezuela doing these days?
Free markets work better than socialism for distributing groceries.
Monopsony markets do NOT work better than socialism for running prisons.
Back in the 1980s, there was a big push for privatized prisons. I was a supporter, because it seemed like a good idea to use the profit motive to drive reform. But it has NOT worked, and private prisons have a dismal record. Since I believe in evidence based reasoning, I no longer support private prisons. They were a mistake.
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You probably mean to say "we'll pay to put people in prison, but we won't actually PUNISH them", right?
Because $75,000 is *not* what it costs for an individual to live in a cement cell in the ground, get served shitty food, and work on a chain gang 365 days a year.
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The US does pay for educating people through secondary school.
Well over half of prison inmates did not successfully compete their free, government-funded education.
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We need better educated criminals.
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Supporting each of approximately 8,000 homeless persons in San Francisco costs about $30,000 or $250 million total; presumably other cities' costs are similar. (Source: homeless censuses and San Francisco budgetary estimates, not including emergency medical services.)
Either government human services are not cheap -- or Harvard is.
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No, it's not just you: plenty of people hold such stupid beliefs and make such trite statements.
Fact is that the US spends massively on education. Our per pupil spending is among the highest in the world. Yet, there is little relationship between spending and student performance/outcomes.
Spending insane amounts of money on incarceration in California d
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How many days in the "war on terror" is that?
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Practically a bargain.
Re:we'll pay for prison (Score:5, Funny)
So...Rob a Bank, get a free education?
In fall 2016, some 20.5 million students are expected to attend American colleges and universities
This is one trillion five hundred billion dollars.
Fuck You.
I don't want to interrupt your delightful exposition, but as far as I can tell the proposal for tax-funded college doesn't necessarily require that we send everyone to Harvard.
In fact, if I may be so bold, I would tentatively suggest that it could be a tad tricky to fit 20.5 million students into Harvard, as it's only 85 ha (344 km^2) in size.
Looking into it, even if we assume that we can squeeze 4 students in per square meter (a proposal that is sure to deflate any hopes of reducing the number of Title IX charges this year), we're still 19.12 million students short!
We would need to stack our students 15 stories high, and that doesn't even take into account how we're gonna keep them standing still the entire semester, cause with entropy this thing will rapidly become un-manageable, and good luck keeping your customer satisfaction ratings up then! You can already expect a solid one-star ratings drop from the students the staff will have to park their cars on.
However, I'm sure you have already considered this before enlightening us all with your sparkling wit. So, with great anticipation and rock-hard nipples, I await your solution.
Thank you.
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Ya know, I expect that if these people currently in prison actually went into the armed services, their chances of committing crime and ending up in prison would been cut dramatically.
More than one hoodlum in the early 20th Century who was offered a choice of Prison or the Army ended up being a decorated solider.
I believe that Colonel David H. Hackworth [wikipedia.org] was given an option by the judge...prison or, in his case, the Merchant Marines.
The Reality of the Armed services changes you, usually for the better.
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Yet the US spends some $600 billion on the largest jobs program in the world, the United States Armed Forces. What do we have for a return on our investment on that?
Professionally trained killers who are willing to give up their lives to protect you from the rest of the world.
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The way things have gone lately, it's more like the rest of the world needs protected from our professional trained killers. Some perspective for you. Then we wonder why the rest of the world hates the US? Maybe if we stopped sending troops all over the fucking place to kill people who never did a damn thing to anyone in the US.
Every bomb we drop somewhere in the world..another angry terrorist
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An excess of them. The US military is vastly bloated - it's simply huge, and expensive. The US spends three times more than Russia and China combined. It's certainly very nice to have enough firepower to take on the entire world at once, but is it really the best use of taxpayer money? If the military budget were cut in half it would instantly eliminate the spending deceit and with a lot left over, and the US would still be a military superpower.
Re:we'll pay for prison (Score:4, Insightful)
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PS: No one was scared by your DMCA takedowns...
Read and weep: https://www.kickingthebitbucket.com/2017/06/06/the-slashdot-asshats-who-stole-my-pictures/ [kickingthebitbucket.com]
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No one stole your pictures, you absurd mockery of a primate. No one was angry, no one was retaliating.
Where's criemer [slashdot.org], cremier [slashdot.org] and creinner [slashdot.org]?
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But ....
You are aware that the USA has one of the highest amounts of imprissioned people per capita on the world? And besides Haiti and Somalia the highest crime rate. Most certainly the highest crime rate in the 'civilizes' world. Which raises the question if the USA actually belong to the civilized world.
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Most inmates aren't murders they are drug dealers, users, and thieves. $80k/yr for 5-10 years to keep someone from stealing a $30k-$60k car sounds like a lot of money to me. It really all comes down to which crimes are worth $80k/yr and which might be handled better in a different way.
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If we cared about that, our prisons would look more like mental health facilities and we would give people an incentive to rehabilitate quickly by releasing them as soon as they're better instead of releasing them unconditionally when their time is up.
No, our justice system is more about revenge than anything else.
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If released, how likely is a homicide convict likely to repeat? How much would you be willing to pay to prevent a loved-one from being added to the victim list? $80k seems like a small price to pay if it would prevent another murder.
Any amount sounds like a small amount to pay in theory, but they add up rapidly in fact. Also, $80K might save more lives used another way. Most serious policy decisions either impact the lives or the quality of life of many people.
It's also not just about how likely someone is to reoffend--it's also about punishment (from the "retributivist" side) and about deterrence (which is a part of the "consequentialist" side that also includes the recidivism factor you're identifying.)
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Huh? (Score:3)
What's beer gov?
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How long have you been following politics that you still wonder whether they're drunk?
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What's beer gov?
It's when you drink before voting. The US tried it last year, and look how great everything's turning out!
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It was your first election cycle?
There hasn't been a major party candidate worth voting for in my lifetime. It's always vote against the worst one.
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Expected (Score:5, Informative)
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'It's not exactly "spiteful" to want to keep people who have murdered or raped others away from the rest of society'
What about the other half of the prison population?
U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, "Prisoners in 2014" https://www.bjs.gov/content/pu... [bjs.gov]
Table 11: Estimated percent of sentenced prisoners under state jurisdiction, by offense, sex, race, and Hispanic origin, December 31, 2013
Violent crimes, all inmate: 53.2%
Murder, all inmates: 12.5%
Rape, all
We're doing it wrong news at 11 (Score:5, Insightful)
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Staff forgot to lock up inmates
On Friday night, staff at Norrtalje prison forgot to lock up six inmates in their cells, three of whom are convicted murderers.
The inmates took their chance by baking chocolate cake and watching TV.
"It was one of the most enjoyable evenings we've had in a long time," said one of the inmates.
Major impact actually from MJ and MMJ (Score:5, Interesting)
When I found out the King County budget was exploding, it turned out a lot of that was for enforcement, trials, juries, and prison for people who were using MJ.
We slashed our budget by making MJ arrests the lowest enforcement priority in Seattle and Tacoma.
Then we legalized MJ and MMJ statewide.
California will soon do this as well.
It's a "crime" that is almost entirely enforced on black and brown folks even though most users and dealers are actually white.
And then they have prison records, so they can't work.
By pardoning everyone and removing these "convictions" from their records, we increase the GDP and get more people working and paying taxes.
Same for California. Same for Canada.
Statistics (Score:2)
The price for each inmate has doubled since 2005
Is this one of those cases where the budget was fixed, and the number of inmates decreased, thereby making it look like the price of keeping an inmate increased? The summary itself says that the inmate population decreased by one-quarter, but at the same time the budget is the highest ever.
some people are in for the free doctors (Score:2)
some people are in for the free doctors
Prison guards make around $150k a year in Calif. (Score:5, Insightful)
Prison guards' Union, for some weird reason, wields great power in California state legislature and the politicians generally just give them whatever they want.
Re:No, it's $3774 per month (Score:5, Informative)
That's nice. How about looking at some real world data:
http://gawker.com/5797381/spoi... [gawker.com]
"One sergeant with a base salary of $81,683 collected $114,334 in overtime and $8,648 in bonuses last year, and he's not even the highest paid."
$81k base + $114k overtime + $8k bonus = $203k
Oh and not every prison guard lives in Bay area.
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Even the ones that do, live near San Quentin. Not exactly Pacifica.
Prisons are not about protecting society. (Score:2, Insightful)
Prisons are a business, Anyone thinking otherwise is incredibly uneducated on how the USA does things in the legal system.
Harvard? (Score:2)
Or Yale? [dilbert.com]
Hmm. Per Prisoner? (Score:2)
Isn't California in the middle of a multi-year effort to reduce the size of its prison population? And didn't they just pass a proposition to increase the number of non-violent offenders given parole?
Simple thought experiment. Suppose you had facilities for a million prisoners, and they were totally full. Then you reduce the number of prisoners to just one, maintaining the capacity to handle a million inmates. What would happen to your total prison spending? What would happen to your per inmate spending?
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Well, then I apologize. One does lose lose sight of what seems simple to others.
This reminds me of one of my former colleagues, a CPA, called "the accounting koan": When are fixed costs variable, and variable costs fixed?
Let me say, that gem simply killed in our little group.
Bad Comparison (Score:5, Informative)
This comparison is stupid.
Contrary to popular belief: Harvard's true tuition is based on your family's income/assets, it's not fixed like standard schools. I get that the "list price" is $69K, but that's not the "cost" if your family isn't earning ~$250K/year. Harvard has "need-based" scholarship programs that can reduce the true cost to zero or near zero. The point is, if your academics can get you into Harvard College, they don't want you to worry about the price, they want you to attend. Oh, and they disallow student loans. https://college.harvard.edu/fi... [harvard.edu]
From the Harvard site (linked): "In fact, approximately 70 percent of our students receive some form of aid, and about 60 percent receive need–based scholarships and pay an average of $12,000 per year. Twenty percent of parents pay nothing. No loans required."
Here's a calculator: https://college.harvard.edu/fi... [harvard.edu]
In other words, the "genius" who made this comparison isn't Harvard material - and is trying to say "it's expensive to house our inmates" by assuming Harvard is expensive. The truth is, it's not.
If s/he had done some research, s/he could should have said "Cost of a Porsche Boxster S", or something else that is actually "expensive" instead of making the poor people think they've got no chance of affording Harvard if they can get in.
Sloppy journalism.
-SM
Go Crimson!
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unpopular fix (Score:3, Interesting)
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If only we didn't turn everything that some legislator doesn't like into felonies...
Re: If only all of us would stop committing feloni (Score:2)
Re:If only all of us would stop committing felonie (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:If only all of us would stop committing felonie (Score:5, Insightful)
College educated people had to be hired to design the F-35. So it's not a total waste. Arms industry represents about 2% of the nation's GDP and about 10% of the US's manufacturing output.
Obviously being the world leader in death and destruction doesn't sit well with some of us. But it is extremely profitable.
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No place on the planet does that.
If college is free, it has _strict_ academic standards to get and stay in.
And that makes complete sense, why should we send disruptive and/or unengaged students to college? Waste of time and money.
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You assume that people who are in prison would be "unengaged" or "disruptive". If you solve whatever social or behavioral or economic problem that caused them to commit felonies then I'd argue you are part of the way there to education, graduation and meaningful employment. A very big "if" of course.
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The
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Better luck next reincarnation. Thanks for playing!
What do you say to someone who has been huffing toluene for a decade? They're done.
On another vein: In the world of finite seats *, educating one person has an opportunity cost of not educating another, possibly more than one...
Big part of why so much of college's population is kids. The oldsters students are there as sorta-teachers, like yeast in dough. The fact is that 'years of use' has a lot to do with how 'socially useful' education is, so young
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No place on the planet does that.
If you mean planet earth, you are wrong. Facepalm.
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Name a place that has unlimited college for failing students?
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I mean unlimited FREE college, obviously.
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Again, name one.
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I know for a fact that it isn't true for Germany. Don't make grades in HS, no college. Don't make grades for one semester in college, find yourself bouncing down the stairs, on your ass. Germany needs ditch diggers too.
Paying for permastudents to party is far beyond reasonable.
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Recidivism rates have not improved. So may of those released are likely to end up back in prison. Without addressing the underlying cause we shouldn't expect any change.
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Wow putting 1 in 40 people in prison in the US isn't working out well?
Total population of California: 40 million. Prison population of California: 130K. You might want to revise your x-in-y numbers.
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It might help the abuses of prison labor if the profits went to something public like roads or schools instead of being used to offset prison costs. Proper budgets and ceasing the for-profit prison industry would make it easier to bring in reforms. The other barrier is that some believe that a felon deserves nothing more than a bullet to the brain. (I'm not trying to bring up a strawman, really it's only a rhetorical device)