But your plan seems to ignore this. We have a system which, according to you can’t handle the current level of people being released from prison. And you want to massively overwhelm this system with a much larger flood of releases. Aren’t you just dooming these people back to committing more crimes? Or worst, dooming some of them to die.
Any Jubilee system would essentially put an end to borrowing and lending.
Which, IMHO, is a good thing.
Studied any economic history? Borrowing and lending is the foundation of economic growth. Societies that try to eliminate it fall into stagnation.
Yes, but lenders only lend because they expect, you know, repayment.
When I borrowed money at a higher interest rate, I was happy to have the opportunity to do so. I’d rather not have the government stick its nose in my private, mutually beneficial transaction with another private entity and tell us we couldn’t proceed.
Would this be something that was announced in advance? I would have to assume so because it would result in massive economic and social upheaval. Let’s say that it’s announced a year in advance, in the questionable assumption that a year would provide enough time for financial institutions to prepare. So we now have a population of 300 million people who are told that in a year all their debts would be wiped away, and all non-violent criminals would be released from prison.
What do you think would happen in that year?
It seems that people want their debts forgiven, but don’t think through the consequences of having everyone’s debts written off. The economy runs because it is easy to borrow money, and it is easy because the lenders have an expectation of being repaid with interest.
Or we could go back to the stagnation of a gold standard.
And borrowers only borrow because they need, you know, money. What’s your point?
His point is that, without promise of repayment, there’s no motivation for a lender to lend. A jubilee might be wonderful for, let’s say, people who currently have student loan debt. It would be an awful development for, let’s say, current high school juniors who want to apply for new student loans. Similar situation for current mortgage holders and people who want to apply for a new mortgage.
If I’m a bank and suddenly all debts that people owe me vanish, there’s no way that I’d be interested, or capable, of giving new loans to people. A plan like this would result in a massive spree of purchasing on debt, followed by a disintegration of the economy as creditors who don’t get repaid stop loaning.
Your WAG is correct. The drug war accounts for a big proportion of it. The federal prison population skyrocketed even faster than the states, and the vast majority of that was driven by imprisonment of non-violent, low-level drug offenders. Other factors include (1) mandatory minimums and harsher sentencing across the board (like 3 strikes laws); (2) more arrests for petty offenses (broken windows policing); (3) elimination of mental health institutions; and (4) the elimination of parole.
I’m not sure I would call a couple of paragraphs my “plan,” though I did mention the need for more resources for mental health and substance abuse. Something like 35% of people imprisoned for drug possession are back in prison for using the same drug within two years. That’s an obvious place for intervention.
An actual decarceration plan would do a bunch of things, starting with ending the war on drugs and eliminating all of the policies that led to mass incarceration in the first place. I agree that just tossing a bunch of people out of prison would not be a good plan. I was addressing the spirit of the idea.
Substance abuse treatment usually doesn’t work. Therefore spending more money on it won’t help. I suspect, therefore, that one of the effects of releasing large numbers of prisoners is going to be a significant increase in the population of homeless people.
Regards,
Shodan
It’s more complicated than that. Relapse rates for drug addiction are lower than many chronic conditions like hypertension, diabetes, or asthma. The issue is that addiction treatment requires long-term management and care (which is expensive and contrary to the model many people have in their minds of how addiction works), so we treat it like six months in a halfway house will solve it. While a person is receiving resources for treatment, it is quite effective. But what happens once their six-month program is complete is they are put back into the same conditions without much support and they relapse.
Another factor is that a huge proportion of people with substance abuse issues also need mental health treatment. We’ve gone backwards on that over the last few decades, in many places offering fewer services than we did in 1980. We need to reverse that. Which is not to say that throwing more money at the problem is a magic bullet. Addiction treatment is hard. But there’s a big gap between hard and not worth doing.
The bottom line question is this: You have $30,000. You can either spend it (every year!) to keep a single person in prison because they are addicted to heroin, or you can do something else with it. Raise your hand if you think the best thing for society is to spend it to keep the person in prison.
Then why is the dropout rate during treatment so high?
Regards,
Shodan
You say that like it contradicts what I said, which of course it does not. While people are in treatment, it is effective at preventing relapse. When they leave treatment–by completion or drop-out–they tend to relapse.
As your own cite points out in the very first sentence, the drop-out rates are similar for medical and psychological treatments. Do you believe we should give up on diabetes treatment because lots of people drop out from the regimen and get sick again, Shodan? Or do you think maybe we should work on improving diabetes treatment?
I mean, let’s just quote the whole abstract from your cite for good measure:
You are doing what many substance abuse programs do when they talk about results - cherry-picking.
Substance abuse treatment doesn’t usually work. Therefore, spending more money on it instead of prison will usually be a waste of time, either because they drop out of treatment and relapse, or because they complete treatment and then relapse.
This is pretty much like saying that an 800 calorie a day diet is “quite effective” in helping an obese person lose weight. (The ones who can’t stick to the diet don’t count.)
Regards,
Shodan
Err, no. Cherry-picking is when you point to good results and ignore bad ones. I think what you’re trying to accuse me of is pointing to how treatment is successful but ignoring that many people don’t stay in treatment. Except, of course, I was the one who started with that exact comment. So your argument is a bit of a mess.
This is just repeating what you’ve said without responding to anything. Ignoring all the problems I already pointed out with this reasoning, let’s assume you’re right that it’s impossible to treat addiction successfully in most cases. Why would you rather pay $30,000 per year to imprison someone than have them homeless? You don’t think you can mitigate whatever harms are caused by the homelessness with an additional $30,000 in your pocket?
Great analogy. So, in your view, should we declare that dieting to lose weight doesn’t work? I would have thought you’d come down on the other side of that debate.
Just like with weight loss, and with diabetes (and I noticed you ducked my question on that), we should be focused on studying how to help people stay compliant with their diet and treatment instead of throwing our hands up and declaring failure. Your own cite suggested several ways that more resources improve treatment compliance.
And since that is exactly what you did, it would be “err, yes”.
That indeed would be an “err, no”. I have responded to what you claimed, with cites and everything.
If homeless people spent their money on not being homeless (instead of on drugs and alcohol) they wouldn’t be homeless. $30K would certainly buy a lot of drugs, though. So if your idea is simply to release drug addicts from prison and pay them $30,000 a year (or less, if we want to spend any of that money on treatment that doesn’t work or half-way houses that they walk away from), then no doubt lots of them will OD themselves out of the way or freeze to death or kill one another, and that might save money.
Whether that’s better than prison is not clear.
Regards,
Shodan
Look, if you’re just trying to score cheap rhetorical points by taking my quotes out of context and ignoring large parts of my post, then more power to you. It’s just that sometimes you do actually engage and sometimes you don’t, and it’s hard to tell the difference.
There needs to be a lender. With a Jubilee, there’d be far fewer banks, etc. willing to lend.
I’m in agreement with you, I just didn’t understand your quote without context. Jubilee would be a disaster.