[QUOTE=Ensign Edison]
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.
[/QUOTE]
Actually, that is pretty much what you said. I know it was only a few minutes ago, but you remember the part where you asked me “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?” Remember that part?
[QUOTE=Grossbottom]
Actually, that is pretty much what you said. I know it was only a few minutes ago, but you remember the part where you asked me “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?” Remember that part?
[/QUOTE]
You seem to be having some trouble either understanding me or stating your own position. Let me be more clear, maybe that will that help. My question to you is this: Why do you believe that because illegal bribery happens, the state may therefore ethically get itself a piece of the action? Also, what makes you think it’s zero sum game where the state gets the money and therefore corrupt guards do not? Since so very few people are able to get in the pay-to-stay program, presumably the corrupt guards in the vast, vast majority of prisons with no “luxury” suites won’t see their standard of living disrupted much, if at all.
I’ve very surprised at the reaction here; IMO the concept is not only ethical, it’s a net positive (assuming, as has been the case for the past 230 years, that Americans aren’t going to really support true prison reform).
The criminal justice system provides a public defender free of cost, but doesn’t require a defendant to use the public defender. If the defendant wants to spend his/her money on what he/she perceives to be a better lawyer, we don’t call that action unethical.
The criminal justice system itself may be unethical because public defenders may be an inadequate legal aide. Fine, but then your problem is with the state’s lack of support for public defenders, not the right of wealthier clients to use private attorneys. Similarly, if you think the practice of paying for better jail conditions is unethical, I think the problem is with the general status of prisoners, so petition the state for better funding of prisons.
My view is that nobody should have to live under current prison conditions; I think it would be wonderful if a general population prisoner was incarcerated under conditions where the threat of violence and rape (to name two examples) was as close to zero as possible. But I’m a realist, and understand that Americans by and large are not going to support prison reform. The program described in the article is at least a step in the right direction; if it raises enough money to improve general conditions, more the better.
[QUOTE=Ensign Edison]
My question to you is this: Why do you believe that because illegal bribery happens, the state may therefore ethically get itself a piece of the action?
[/QUOTE]
So we come now to the root of your problem: you have an ethical objection. It seems sleazy, doesn’t it? But you knew, right, that they have stores in prisons where they sell things to prisoners? And depending on the prison, the profits can go to running those prisons? If a convict has ten extra bucks to spend he’s allowed to buy an pack of smokes and a twinkie and I don’t see anyone protesting that. Prisoners can and do use outside resources to ameliorate prison life, there’s nothing new about this. It’s just a new product on the commissary shelves, that’s all it is. Your ethical objection is either ill-founded or extremely late to the party.
[QUOTE=Ensign Edison]
Also, what makes you think it’s zero sum game where the state gets the money and therefore corrupt guards do not?
[/QUOTE]
Because money isn’t infinitely replicable. Money given to the state for better digs is money not given to someone else for something else. I just don’t understand what problem you’re having with the math on that.
**
[QUOTE=Little Nemo]
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.
[/QUOTE]
I’m not sure I agree with this. The program is clearly a privilege, not a right, so I’d think such prisoners would be more willing to toe the line. And if prison employees are so easily infulenced toward bribery, you have much bigger problems with the prison staff. Finally, there are more people applying to the program than there are spaces available, and that’s with prison conditions as they are now. The only incentive for making general non-paying prison sentences worse is if there was an unused inventory of paying spaces, and I just don’t believe that day is going to come anytime soon. You could, IMO, triple the daily rate and still have wealthy prisoners lining up for the program.
[QUOTE=Grossbottom]
So we come now to the root of your problem: you have an ethical objection.
[/quote]
Now? I stated as much from the very beginning. Your responses are beginning to make me wonder if you’re reading this thread at all.
The rest of what you say is absurd. Can prisoners buy time out of prison in the commissary? You seriously think a package of Oreos is merely quantitatively different from the ability to pay to leave the prison? No qualitative difference there?
[QUOTE=iamthewalrus(:3=]
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.
[/QUOTE]
Define afford. What if Dad goes to jail for some minor crime, as a result of his 6 months leave of absence he is let go from his job. The house is mortgaged but they have managed to put 20k away for whatever reason, could be college, home improvements, rainy day fund, just general savings. Now Mom has to take care of the kids alone, deprived of their Father's income for 6 months with a mortgage that factored in his income. Should they take his 20,000 because he did something stupid once?
As for the rest of it. I don’t think it’s a big deal. The Prison Industrial Complex is ridiculous. If people want to help fund their operations so I don’t have to pay any more taxes supporting that inanity and get a private room, more power to them. It’s like a private room at the hospital, is it fair that other people have to be sick in a ward or a shared room next to someone else who is sick? No, not really, sorry kid, all men may have been created equal, but some men just had a greater inheritance sometime after that. I am not into the punishment paradigm of prison. I am not one who believes prison should be uncomfortable. It’s a storage unit, it’s a time out. I don’t want them to suffer for what they did, just give them time to chill out and sit and ponder, if they are so inclined.
People who are poor get the shaft in prison every step of the way anyway. Being upset about this is silly. Everyone knows a rich white kid with a quarter pound of pot can get off whereas a poor black kid or Mexican is gonna go to jail. So why not allow people to segregate themselves and as a result pay for the upkeep of the prison?
[QUOTE=Ensign Edison]
Can prisoners buy time out of prison in the commissary? You seriously think a package of Oreos is merely quantitatively different from the ability to pay to leave the prison? No qualitative difference there?
[/QUOTE]
Not in the exchange of money for a thing of value, no. There’s no difference at all. Put another way, it’s every bit as ethically proper to object to Oreos as it is to what they’re selling here. Dude goes on a tri-state murder spree and now he gets Oreos? Are you shitting me?!?! He should eat bread and water every last day of his miserable life, now that’s a proper prison. He’s there to be punished for what he did, so how are Oreos punishing him? They’re not. They’re a luxury and he’s giving money to the state to obtain them. It subverts the very point of putting him in prison.
In a capitalist society, convicts will continue to live qualitatively better lives as a result of their outside resources, there’s nothing we can do to stop that. The state can either make money on this, or not. But choosing to lose money that could otherwise be legally recouped, just because it’s somehow ok to sell them cookies and blankies but suddenly not okay to sell them “other” special treatment is what is absurd. It’s a completely arbitrary division between one luxury and another, and unless you can explain why ethically a convict should be permitted to buy one but not the other, then you’re hardly mounting a convincing argument.
This kind of thing has a long history.
I recall reading in Durant’s Our Oriental Heritage that in imperial China, all criminal suspects were supposed to be tortured, a practice followed because some humanitarian emperor had long ago decreed no one should be convicted save on his own confession (not as unreasonable as it sounds when you consider most crimes were punishable by death or castration). But it was well known you could bribe your torturers to go easy, a practice the torturers themselves defended on humanitarian grounds. (Not torturing the poorer suspects either would, of course, be unthinkable, as it would diminish respect for the law.)
I’m also flashing on the scene in The Threepenny Opera when the jailer explains to MacHeath the prices the prisoner can pay to be burdened with various weights of chains (the lighter, the more expensive; none at all costs most of all).
[QUOTE=Grossbottom]
Not in the exchange of money for a thing of value, no. There’s no difference at all. Put another way, it’s every bit as ethically proper to object to Oreos as it is to what they’re selling here. Dude goes on a tri-state murder spree and now he gets Oreos? Are you shitting me?!?! He should eat bread and water every last day of his miserable life, now that’s a proper prison. He’s there to be punished for what he did, so how are Oreos punishing him? They’re not. They’re a luxury and he’s giving money to the state to obtain them. It subverts the very point of putting him in prison.
[/quote]
That’s not my objection. I despise the prison system and think it’s entirely broken. So if you’ve been arguing with me on the assumption that I object to some prisoners getting something nicer, that was erroneous.
This is irrelevant. The law exists to hold back inevitable tides of all kinds of injustice. Injustice, theft, murder, extortion, bribery, all this will indeed always exist, but that’s certainly not an argument from ethics. I don’t think it’s an argument from anything but nihilism.
Then why doesn’t the state turn prisons into brothels? Many prisoners act as whores now; money is there to be made, so why shouldn’t the state take a cut?
It’s “completely arbitrary” to say that paying for cookies and paying to leave prison 12 hours a day are qualitatively different? Are you suggesting that because we let them have cookies, there is no limit to what we must allow them to buy? We can’t draw any lines, it’s too late, they have shampoo and Doritos! That sounds arbitrary to me.
[QUOTE=henrijohns]
I think people with money who enter prison ought to pay the many thousands needed for their upkeep.
[/QUOTE]
Most of them, of course, would not have the means.
More importantly, treating prisoners as an economic resource for the state to exploit might lead to a lot of unjust convictions or needlessly long sentences. It always seems to work out that way in countries that have labor camps. It was probably that way in America back when we used chain gangs for roadwork.
[QUOTE=Ensign Edison]
I despise the prison system and think it’s entirely broken.
[/QUOTE]
What would you do with criminals instead? Prison won’t rehabilitate them and might not even deter them all that much, but at least it keeps them out of circulation for a while.
[QUOTE=Ensign Edison]
That’s not my objection. I despise the prison system and think it’s entirely broken. So if you’ve been arguing with me on the assumption that I object to some prisoners getting something nicer, that was erroneous.
[/QUOTE]
Then state your precise objection, and state it clearly. You seem to have an ethical problem with this, but that tells us nothing. Calling something unfair is different than explaining why it’s unfair, so why don’t you explain precisely what your problem with this is?
[QUOTE=Ensign Edison]
Then why doesn’t the state turn prisons into brothels? Many prisoners act as whores now; money is there to be made, so why shouldn’t the state take a cut?
[/QUOTE]
Because I said legally recoup. Prostitution is illegal. And if it wasn’t illegal I’d have no problem with the state selling whore licenses to convicts.
[QUOTE=Ensign Edison]
It’s “completely arbitrary” to say that paying for cookies and paying to leave prison 12 hours a day are qualitatively different? Are you suggesting that because we let them have cookies, there is no limit to what we must allow them to buy? We can’t draw any lines, it’s too late, they have shampoo and Doritos! That sounds arbitrary to me.
[/QUOTE]
So draw the line already. Tell me where that line is, ethically, and tell me why it is where it is. The state takes money every day in exchange for less time served, we call it plea bargaining. I don’t see you objecting. The state takes money every day for little luxuries once a convict is in prison, but I don’t see you objecting. Suddenly the state takes money for furlough and a private room, and you have an issue? Yeah, actually, that’s exactly what I call arbitrary, because there’s only a difference in how much time out and luxury the guy was allowed to buy. It’s a purely quantitative difference. I’ve more than said as much, so if you’ve got an explanation of how there’s a susbtantive ethical difference between these episodes of the state trading better treatment for dollars, let’s hear it.
Again: You can buy time out. You can buy snacks. Now you can buy a nicer room and less fear from getting cornholed in the shower. I say there’s no difference, and I can’t prove a negative, whereas you’re the one alleging a qualitative difference, so pony up.
[QUOTE=Grossbottom]
Then state your precise objection, and state it clearly. You seem to have an ethical problem with this, but that tells us nothing. Calling something unfair is different than explaining why it’s unfair, so why don’t you explain precisely what your problem with this is?
[/quote]
I have stated it clearly. You’ll need to read posts not addressed to you, though.
What? My point is that this makes something illegal legal. Obviously, if we turned prisons into brothels we’d make it legal first, as has been done in this case.
I’ve said it several times. Wherever it is, it’s certainly some space before not being in prison half the time. I can’t imagine most people would disagree with me here.
Have we met before? Because you’re making an awful lot of assertions about what I normally object to, but I don’t reckon I have any idea who you are. Surely you don’t think I am obligated to present a laundry list of every complaint I have about the justice system if I mention any at all? Anyway, whether I object to similar practices has nothing to do with whether this one is ethical. Neither, for that matter, does whether similar practices already exist.
Painful as it might be to watch a man swallow a camel while straining at a gnat, it’s even more painful to watch a man strain at a gnat that isn’t there.
Murderers, kidnappers, and the like have nothing to do with this discussion. Such people are sent to prison: a facility for incarcerating felons, those whose sentences are in excess of one year. The “pay to stay” cells are in jails. Jails hold those convicted of misdemeanors, and those who are awaiting or have been denied bail. There are wolves a-plenty, and not a few mice, but no one there is a “lifer.”
Oh, and this:
looks like …(GD, 'tag, you’re in GD) … like it isn’t exactly entirely accurate. Is there, perhaps, a literary device of some sort at play? Or is it something more, er, fundamental?
It’s about as accurate as Grossbottom’s other claim that prison guards are routinely collecting bribes. I guess they’ve been holding out on me.
Those of us who actually run prisons are not idiots. Being the people who have to take care of the problems that occur, we have an interest in avoiding those problems. So we don’t throw a bunch of different prisoners all into the same cell block just so we can sit back and watch the hilarity that results. The guys who got arrested for DUIs or marijuana or banking fraud and are unlikely to be disciplinary problems in prison are sent to medium security prisons. Guys in for more serious violent crimes are sent to maximum security prisons. Genuinely insane criminals are also seperated out from general population. We have special units for prisoners who are elderly or handicapped or mentally retarded. Prisoners who behave get rewarded by being moved to units with more privileges; those who don’t go to units with fewer privileges.
I’m all for prison reform. Unlike most of you, I spend a lot of time in prison so reform would benefit me personally. But you have to be realistic - the prison I work in has over 1600 people living in it, all of whom were convicted of at least one major felony - it’s never going to be a paradise on earth. You concentrate that much unsocial behavior into one area and you’re going to have inevitable problems - you just work on controlling it and minimizing the problems.
[QUOTE=Nametag]
Murderers, kidnappers, and the like have nothing to do with this discussion. Such people are sent to prison: a facility for incarcerating felons, those whose sentences are in excess of one year. The “pay to stay” cells are in jails. Jails hold those convicted of misdemeanors, and those who are awaiting or have been denied bail. There are wolves a-plenty, and not a few mice, but no one there is a “lifer.”
[/QUOTE]
An irrelevant distinction for purposes of Ensign Edison’s rather murky ethical objection(s), whatever they might actually be. But yes, for logistical purposes there’s a difference.
[QUOTE=Nametag]
looks like …(GD, 'tag, you’re in GD) … like it isn’t exactly entirely accurate. Is there, perhaps, a literary device of some sort at play? Or is it something more, er, fundamental?
[/QUOTE]
Plea bargaining is what it sounds like it is. In exchange for something the prosecutor wants, the accused gives up something of value. It’s a straight up barter. An embezzler coughs up the money, a thief tells where the jewels are, a murderer confesses and saves the state the expense of a trial, it’s all just a series of financial deals. The state reduces the pain in exchange for what it wants, usually money saved.
I know of a man sitting in jail right now who specifically instructed his bankers not to yield up his embezzled funds when he asked for them during the plea bargain and trial process. Why? Because he knew he didn’t have the willpower not to buy time off his sentence, and he wanted the money when he got out.
[QUOTE=Little Nemo]
It’s about as accurate as Grossbottom’s other claim that prison guards are routinely collecting bribes. I guess they’ve been holding out on me.
[/QUOTE]
To be fair, I’m sure most guards are decent folk. And I wish I could tell you that when I googled I didn’t turn up newstory after newstory about this or that corrections officer being sentenced for smuggling, or this or that state having trouble keeping drugs out of prison. But that really wasn’t what happened. I’ll defer to your experience, but I hope you can forgive me if from the outside I begin to develop the idea that guards and prison staff are being found complicit with some degree of regularity.
And why does the District Attorney care whether or not embezzlers and thieves give up their loot? Seriously, think about it. The government has no financial interest in whether or not the stolen property is returned to its rightful owner. Nor does he really care about the expense of the trial - it’s not coming out of his pocket and in fact, as far as salary is concerned, a portion of it will be going into his pocket.
The reality is that the average District Attorney’s office has the resources to conduct a certain amount of cases in any given time period. However, there will usually be more crimes occurring in that time period then there will be available resources. So DA’s triage cases; they prosecute the ones where they feel they have the most chance of winning and the ones they feel they can win with the least amount of resources and the ones they feel are the most serious. Plea bargaining is one of the things that happens to the other cases - the accused are offered an opportunity to plead guilty to a lesser charge in exchange for minimizing the court resources used on their case.
But it’s not like the DA ultimately saved any money. The resources that were not used on the plea-bargained case were just applied to other cases. If the defendant refused to accept the deal and insisted on a full trial, the DA would have to comply and cut back on the resources to those other cases so they could be used for this case. The DA would probably be annoyed that he had to allocate those resources to a case he hadn’t thought was a priority, but he wasn’t making an actual gain or loss either way.
I don’t know what your occupation is but I’m sure you could google up hundreds of people with the same job who’ve broken laws as well.