Hey, feel free to make whatever informal arrangements you want among your circle of acquaintances, but if a corporation is involved, government nose-sticking is pretty much required or it all falls apart.
This could be a good sorting technique: release them all, the sociopaths will be re-arrested, the people who can successfully integrate with society will be free to do so.
Biggest problem is that the sociopaths would be re-arrested after hurting people, and I wouldn’t want to make that short-term sacrifice for even a guaranteed long-term improvement – which this is not.
(In no small part because of the second-biggest problem that Richard Parker laid out)
The government banning my currently legal transaction in some attempt to save me sounds like a good way of making it all fall apart.
Yes, and borrowers only borrow because they expect to be able to have more money in the future. It’s a situation where both sides end up better than they started.
With a Jubilee, there’d be far fewer lenders willing to lend.
I’m confused. Does your decarceration plan involve releasing people from prison or not?
FDIC insured, but what if the government can’t pay.
I agree. And I think that would be a bad thing. You were the one who said it would be a good thing.
You keep calling it my plan. I’m just talking generally about the good idea of rolling back the policies of mass incarceration.
If I made a plan, I think it would include release of some people but mostly just different policies going forward. If, for example, we legalized marijuana, then I would want to see everyone’s marijuana crimes go away. Similarly, I would reinstitute parole, so some people would be released on parole.
Talking about that as a “plan” is misleading though. It would involve coordinated action at the state and federal level. If we’re talking about the real world here and not just the general idea of decarceration, it would (and hopefully will) happen piecemeal at different levels. There would be no mass release event, but just a slow bending of the curve back to sanity.
I don’t know why you’re assuming your ongoing arrangement would be banned or even affected.
Yes, but isn’t child support a set amount per month? (Unless one goes to court to try to change that.) Then could you not say, “I pay X per month and there are Y months left until the child is 18 so my total debt for child support is X*Y=Z. So my debt of Z is now cancelled.”?
Well, personally, I would buy ten mega-mansions, a couple of yachts, a ton of land and cars. Then wait out the year until they are mine free and clear.
Solution: Treatment prisons. They go and get cleaned out and some counseling and therapy. If Richard Parkers stat, that most relapse within two years, is correct then keep them in treatment prison for at least 5 years after they are clean.
It seems to me that universal debt forgiveness is more or less equivalent to massive hyper-inflation in which money becomes worthless. If the price of one peanut will pay off your $400,000 house loan, then that debt is effectively forgiven. History tells us that massive hyperinflation is not good for society.
If you want to achieve the goals of the author (i.e. sticking it to the lenders) in a more sane way, then you should just enforce a significant wage hike for all workers, and increased government spending, while welcoming the naturally resulting spike in inflation and interest rates.
This doesn’t sound very much like releasing non-violent offenders from prison. Unless I am missing your point.
Regards,
Shodan
Now we all know how well you thought your proposal through.
I’m talking about what you posted here:
Here you’re suggesting not only releasing the majority of prisoners but you’re also saying it could be done without any negative consequences. But then right after saying most prisoners can be released with no problems, you say:
That certainly sounds like negative consequences to me.
If prisoners can be released at any time without any problems, then there’s no need to have extensive rehabilitation programs for them. And if prisoners need extensive rehabilitation before they can be released, then you can release the majority of prisoners at will.
Now here’s some reality of prisons from somebody who knows them. Prisoners have a lot of problems. They already have most of those problems before they enter prison. In prison, we spend a huge amount of effort into trying to fix their problems.
Do you realize we’ve been doing that for over thirty years?
I’m prepared to flesh out the proposal, but all you’ve brought to the table is* Dispatches From Galt’s Gulch,* to which I can’t even take offense because it’s silly and empty.
I contemplate a gradual restriction on allowable interest rates, say 1% per year to some acceptable level, prime plus five or even ten or twelve. This might be comparable to usury restrictions that existed prior to the 1980s, before deregulation let the market explode. I recommend Frontline’s “Secret History of the Credit Card” from 2004, which explored cards and payday loans.
I’d be happy to expand on this when I’m later at a computer and not pecking at a smartphone.
Recidivism is a negative consequence if and only if the criminal conduct is actually bad for society and it would not have happened if we had kept the person locked up. A lot of recidivism is being caught again with drugs, for example. Or getting caught with a gun that would otherwise have been legal except that this person was previously convicted of marijuana possession. That recidivism falls into the “not actually bad for society” category. Other recidivism would have happened whether you kept the person in prison for five years or ten years, since we know that the personal deterrect effect of longer sentences has significantly diminishing returns.
So it’s a bit apples and oranges to say that acknowledging recidivism is an acknowledgment that mass release would have huge negative consequences. But the other piece you’re missing is what happens with the billions of dollars we save. And what happens, in my view, is we use that money in smarter ways to stop real crime–the ways that the evidence suggests actually work.
Part of decarceration is not just the release (or ceasing to imprison in the first place) of millions of people, it is also changing the laws with respect to what happens after release. There are thousands of collateral consequences for criminal conviction, and that’s just the ones written down in law. Lots of other consequences are informal. The consequence of all of that is to create a caste system for convicts that is very difficult to escape from upon release and that increases the rate of recidivism. Decarceration requires dismantling a lot of that stuff too.
True. True. And false, respectively and respectfully.
We do not spend a huge amount of effort or resources into trying to fix their problems. In fact, we spend less today per capita than we did 30 years ago. For example, of the roughly $43,000 CA spends per inmate per year, $2150 is spent on rehabilitation. If you cut their sentence in half and spent the second half of that period spending $20,000 on programs to help people with jobs, substance abuse, mental health, social work, and all the rest, you’d see better results.
You might work or previously worked at a prison that seems to do a lot of rehab. But the numbers don’t lie. Pretty much across-the-board such programs were cut and reduced from 1980-2010, and they currently make up a very small percentage of prison spending.
We needn’t speculate about this, either. There have been controlled studies on what happens when you take rehabilitation seriously, where they spend money on a selected part of a prison population and not another population with similar relevant characteristics. Care to guess the outcomes?