New Mexico is an outlier. 22 states have no private prisons. 17 states have fewer prisoners in private prisons than they did 20 years ago while only 14 have more. The total number has gone down 11%.
That may be the idea, but it doesn’t seem to work. More violent or harsh punishments don’t seem to decrease crime.
It makes sense: if you’re rational enough to not commit some crime because you’ll be punished, then it doesn’t matter as much if it’s a moderate or severe punishment. It just needs to not be so light that the criminal would be willing to accept it.
I know I can’t imagine someone saying that having their freedom removed for years was an acceptable loss, but having to go without air conditioning was a step too far.
Plus, none of this does anything to try and fix the problem after the crime occurred, which is when the punishment is dished out. The main reason that these other, lighter systems seem to work is that they actually care about rehabilitation.
And claiming that the for-profit system is not relevant is silly. Even if the prison is publicly run, the system still allows tickets to fund the police operations, allows them to use prison labor for funding, and allows confiscation of any money allegedly used in a crime (though at least that last one is being reduced). There is a perverse incentive to incarcerate more people in the US, which has led to us having such a high incarceration rate.
I mean, unless you think Americans really are more criminally minded than other countries, there’s not a good explanation for the need to incarcerate so many.
Neither do defense contractors or pharmaceutical manufacturers. And yet they somehow wield enormous influence over policy.
Same with 5 year sentences vs. 10 year sentences. If you’re not deterred by 5 years locked up, you’re not going to be deterred by 10. Most people don’t think they’ll get caught, or don’t give a damn at the moment they’re committing a crime.
We (society) want the experience to be especially unpleasant because we’re angry, not because it does any good.
At first thought, this makes a lot of sense. But on second thought, the logical next step is to give the same sentence for all crimes, whether they are serious or less so. How would that work? Everyone stays in for the same length of time? Or everyone stays in until the system decides they’ve been rehabilitated?
I concede that the current system has problems, but what would we replace it with? How does it work elsewhere?
I think Norway’s is a good model. 21-year sentence is the max (and much shorter sentences the norm), but the justice system can tack on additional time as need be, indefinitely, if they determine the perp isn’t truly reformed.
Another pretty fascinating take on the basic topic:
Yeah. I noticed that, too 
Setting aside for the moment that American Exceptionalism means “we don’t give a damn how other countries do it …” it’s a great question.
I think we should always start upstream: who has lower crime and punishment rates than we do, and how do they achieve those. Looks like education is nigh unto a silver bullet.
Looks like most things that we would call “social justice” really do help.
But …
I remember seeing a few documentaries about the incarceration models in Scandinavia and other European countries. Conditions were dramatically more humane, rehabilitation was truly undertaken, costs were much lower, and recidivism rates were a fraction of the US’s.
But screw all that, right ?
We take people from the lowest rungs of society and make them no cost (to them) consumers with guaranteed demand and revenue to institutions whose very existence creates a textbook perverse incentive.
In other words, Manuel wasn’t doing all that awfully well in school. Let’s let him fail, drop out, take to the streets, get involved with drugs and crime, and then double his quantifiable cost to the taxpayers by locking him up for a few decades at $30k+ per year.
[It’s part of privatizing profit and socializing loss in the US. It’s also the logical consequence of the vacuous “personal responsibility” mantra – so dramatically reductive as to have no meaning whatsoever in a complex and tightly-intertwined society]
Or we could do a NPV calculation and decide if there are better ways to spend all this crime and punishment money that – as I intimated upthread – create the ultimate positive sum game.
#Murica.
I’m not sure why air conditioning was used as an example. Many people in this country who work full time are unable to afford to live in a home with air conditioning. Definitely 30 years ago people considered it a luxury item. Why is it necessary for prisoners?
I mean, I’m not for torturous punishment, but that seems an inconvenience, not being given a creature comfort, not something out of an Edgar Allen Poe book.
The difference is, non-prisoner people with no air conditioning can get adequate water, typically aren’t in brick buildings that serve to trap heat, aren’t in conditions where the indoors temperature can exceed 110, and are free to leave or go as they please. There have been a considerable number of inmate deaths in Texas and the South due to overheating in the summer. Not just that, but the guards suffer, too.
You see vindictiveness; I see a desire to make things sufficiently unpleasant for criminals that it will hopefully discourage a return to the behaviors that landed them in prison in the first place.
Does the fact that these sorts of punishments have been shown time and again to not be effective at your stated goal matter here at all?
While I don’t want things to be super pleasant for those who are incarcerated I don’t want them to be brutalized either. Personally, I think segregating them from the rest of society and depriving them of their freedom is punishment enough. I’m perfectly fine with them being somewhat comfortable and even trying to find some sort of meaning to their lives while incarcerated.
Most of the people we imprison are going to be released into the general population at some point. I’d rather have a system designed to keep these people from committing more crimes when they do get out. But this means making sure they can find meaningful employment once they get out.
You’ll have to define “these sorts of punishments.” There’s a WIDE range of variables, both among general conditions and also among things that are designed explicitly as punishments.
Lengthy incarceration in the American model, as opposed to rehabilitation.
Eta: or the death penalty for that matter, but that’s a separate debate.
Not that a desire to punish criminals doesn’t affect conditions in jails - but what’s mostly blocking what some see as criminal justice reform is the overwhelming public desire to see dangerous criminals separated from society.
That goal should rationally be furthered by ensuring humane living conditions and reasonable comforts in prison, though how one defines “reasonable” is a matter for debate (A/C sufficient to keep temps from skyrocketing during Texas summers shouldn’t be debatable). As the Louisiana example shows, cheaping out on prison accommodations for political purposes can prove much more expensive for taxpayers in the long run.
700 something people died in a heat wave in Chicago in 1995, in large part because they couldn’t afford air-conditioning, lived in brick buildings and were afraid to leave their homes or open the windows due to the high crime rate- although they were technically free to do so.
I’m not for torture either, but I sure can understand why someone who’s never been convicted of a crime , has worked all their life and still can’t afford air-conditioning might not be too worried about prisoners getting it.
Beyond that, it’s EXPENSIVE on that scale- like at least 2x the cost of heating around here. Hell, it’s expensive in private homes, which is why many poorer and/or fixed income people may not have it.
I can see why people might look at the fact that A/C isn’t universal and is considered effectively a creature comfort (it wasn’t that long ago when NOBODY had air conditioning in the South), and that it is quite expensive and conclude that maybe if the state had unlimited money, they could air condition the prisons, but if money isn’t unlimited, air conditioning prisons is an unnecessary expense.
Look at it this way… if you had to choose, would you air condition prisons to the tune of likely hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars a year, or use that same money to alleviate hunger, poverty, or hell, just aid non-criminal poor people with air conditioning? That’s effectively the choice that’s being made- that money doesn’t just spontaneously generate; something else has to go short in most years.
That is a false dichotomy. If you cannot afford to incarcerate someone under humane conditions, then you cannot afford to lock that person up, period. You certainly cannot afford the cost of the inevitable prison riots and lawsuits if you do.
As always in these kinds of discussions, the Devil is in the details. I infer from your post that you feel that not providing prisons with AC would be inhumane, but that’s really just a guess.
If posts such as yours are going to be helpful in any way, you MUST define your terms.
So you think that conditions that have killed prisoners are humane? Because those are the conditions under discussion here.