A co-worker sent this and I thought “Wow” <-(that’s me thinking) “somehow that just doesn’t seem right.” I thought about putting this in the pit but figured it would get more productive responses here.
I’m also not fond of money privileges. Gang money, drug money, blood money. Extortion and money laundering money.
I think people with money who enter prison ought to pay the many thousands needed for their upkeep. And get a regular cell.
However, if you have money, regardless of any special program the jail or prison might offer, I am reliably informed that you can make your life easier inside.
My point, then, is that the fact of the matter is that money in great quantitites makes your life easier in many circumstances. You’d think that prison would be the great equalizer, but it’s not.
I don’t really see a problem with the concept; the people it’s being offered to are in for minor offenses, the daily rate is somewhat high considering where you’re staying, no one is buying their way out of a sentence, and I don’t care how nice your money can make it, jail is jail: No one wants to be there. Many offenses carry legal penalties that–at the discretion of the judge–can be satisfied by the option of paying fines, house arrest, or jail time; this just extends that concept slightly to allow convicts with means to alter the conditions–not the duration–of their sentence.
It does bother me that this seems to be an “in the know” program, i.e. it’s only offered to the “right” kind of people. I frankly would like to see it extended to particular, objective classes of offender rather than keeping it a select club, but that’s a minor issue.
The best solution would be for Americans to face up to the problems with prison administration (overcrowding, poor conditions, lack of provable and accountable rehabilitative programs) and commit to fixing them; no one, no matter the offense, should be subject to the horrors (random violence and–let’s say it–forced sodomy) that occur in prison. I’m all for this kind of prison reform and wish it would occur immediately, but in the meantime, the fewer people exposed to it, the better. It’s a pragmatic if imperfect solution.
I don’t have a problem with it. It seems to be more of an additional fine and keeps the more sensitive prisoners away from the hardened ones. And from the article, at US$30K/year, it seems to be geared to prisoners with shorter sentences, hitting them where it really hurts. There’s one taxpayer benefit noted in the article; the other is that with some prisoners paying their way, there’s more to spend on those who can’t / don’t.
These things may be true, but I was under the impression we adopted the rule of law in part to curtail it wherever possible, which is why if a guard takes a bribe he’s also a criminal. I’m surprised to see you of all people giving this a pass as merely ‘unfair’. How do you feel about the law, instead of at least pretending to attempt to be blind, explicitly endorsing this unfairness?
Because “sensitive” people have money and poor people are “hardened”?
The question is not one of benefit. I imagine that if we started eating human flesh and farming certain prisoners to get it, there’d be a lot of cost benefits as well. There’s lots of inherently unethical ways we could make money off prisoners. The mere fact of benefit doesn’t erase the potentially unethical nature. So what is your opinion of that?
We can’t do anything about the prisoners who can’t pay their way, but we can force those who can afford it to pay for their incarceration. I find the notion of allowing rich criminals to pay for better conditions utterly disgusting. :mad:
Why do you think it’s unethical? The punishment is deprivation of liberty.
Look at (per the article) their typical inmates: people convicted of DUI. Not career criminals. Keeping career criminals away from them is a good thing. Otherwise they might make contacts to the detriment of all.
The outrage is silly, because the issue isn’t one of equal treatment. The only issue here is whether that money will go to the state, or go to corrupt prison guards.
What other crimes would you like the state to begin to endorse in order to make money? I assume prostitution would be fine; how about murder? A lot of money goes to thieves that could go to the state instead, maybe it should just skip the whole prison step and just hire felons to commit B&Es and turn over the loot.
People convicted of DUI often are in fact “career” criminals in that they repeat their crime over and over and hurt many innocent people in the process. And again, this doesn’t weed out the precious sensitive flowers from the big mean hardcases at all. It weeds out a few of them who have the money. Many many precious sensitive flowers are just too poor. Or, again, is it that “poor” equals “bad person” and “rich” equals “good person”?
As somebody that actually works in prisons, I see some real problems with this idea.
As others have noted, it’s giving legal sanction to the idea that not all people are equal in the eyes of the law. That’s a really bad principle. Blind justice may not be achievable in the real world but it should remain the goal being strived for.
I also worry about the effect this will have on prison management. Prisoners may develop an attitude of “I pay your salary” and become disciplinary problems. Prison employees may develop an attitude of “the state is accepting money for preferentional treatment, why would it be wrong for me to do the same?” And I think prison administrators would face two problems: on the one hand, there would subtle pressure to go easy on the paying prisoners and look the other way when they cause problems, and on the other hand, there would be an inclination to make the conditions for non-paying prisoners worse, because the available resources would go to the paying prisons and because neglecting the non-paying prisons would highlight the value of the paying ones.
Isn’t forcing only those people with means to pay for prison just as inequitable as this? The penalty for crime X is six months in prison and $20K, unless you can’t afford it, in which case it’s just six months in prison.
Can you explain how this makes any sense at all as a response to what I said, please? I might as well say ‘So you want murder to be legal. Okay, no problem’ back at you.
But surely the punishment set by the courts is the deprivation of liberty? Not necessarily deprivation of comfort. Courts may add hard labour or whatever, of course.
The article indicated that there are more candidates than places, so prisoners are motivated to behave, or they get moved to a public prison and a more tractable inmate gets their place.
Surely the more that pay, the more there is for those that don’t pay?