I think if it were more common to go this route, I’d be more comfortable if there were some judgment at sentencing or discharge. The debt should be quantified from an early date. Would it be subject to bankruptcy relief? It seems most people wouldn’t be able to pay. But it seems hinky to keep the debt in the shadows until someone, perhaps years later, has funds.
If the state wants to recover incarceration costs, why don’t they just calculate the costs and impose a fine at sentencing, rather than hit people with a lawsuit after freeing them?
Since it’s hard for an ex-con to get a regular job, the main ways to get some prosperity would be to return to a life of crime or to somehow get a small nest-egg to start a tiny business. But the latter option is unavailable if the State swoops down to confiscate the money. I’m aghast at the idea, and puzzled that I, and apparently some other Dopers, were unaware of it.
I can agree with forfeiting illicit gains, or that restitution of victims might be mandated. But being billed for incarceration seems outrageous. I hereby Pit all those defending the practice.
I ask again: What other countries do this? Yes, the free food and medical care provided in some third-country prisons may be deplorable, but medical care provided in U.S. prisons seems to often be deplorable also. What about the civilized countries of Europe? Is this another area where the U.S. takes its lead from barbaric banana republics?
They don’t know what the costs will be at sentencing. Convicts very rarely serve out their full sentences thanks to parole and good behavior reductions and gain time and what not.
Seems petty and counterproductive to me. The idea supposedly is that after prison, the ex-con goes straight and becomes a member of society. To saddle them with a large debt and the difficulty of getting a job because you did time seems to be unfair. I think the loss of liberty is punishment enough. The Chinese may charge families for the bullets used in executions, but I don’t think their example is one to follow.
What is wrong with paying for your own costs of living? If a rich man commits a crime and is imprisoned why should we pay to feed, cloth, and house him when he has the means to pay for it himself? Take away all your ifs, ands, and buts, all your extrapolation of what you think will happen, what is wrong with requiring people to pay for their cost of living within their means under any circumstances?
What would you think if Vietnam billed John McCain for his stay in their free guesthouse? Yes; that’s not the most convincing analogy but I don’t have the patience to argue with someone so wrong-headed.
I don’t keep track of all the Dopers; Trinopus is just a name I’d vaguely associated with intelligence. Is this wrong? Are you one of the right-wing assholes?
Because compensation by criminals to the government for the cost of maintaining a justice/penal system is not part of the judicial system. Other than your personal sense that on one should get a “free ride,” what are the actual benefits that will come about for society if we incorporated such practices?
You are also completely confusing who is getting the “services” of incarcerating criminals. Generally, it is us on the outside who reap the ‘benefits’ of jailing people. That’s why we do it. We are all better off (or so the story goes) when certain people are behind bars. That’s what we pay for. Criminals don’t “get” anything for free. What they do is involuntarily participate in their own segregation from the general public, which is something that society has decided is worth doing.
If it’s not worth it to us to keep them in jail, then we should by all means come up with an alternate solution. Just don’t forget that the general public are the ones that are getting something for their money in this whole deal, not the criminals.
After all, what is your freedom worth to you?
TriPolar is also a name I associated with intelligence. How did I mix up the name? Apologies to both of you.
… Maybe I am developing some senility dementia. :eek:
Hold on, I’ll check the onion on my belt.
This is not compensation for maintaining the justice/penal system. This is compensation for the reasonable value of the food, clothing, shelter, and medical care for the prisoners. The things all the rest of us have to pay for. Just like anyone else these costs have to be based on a means of payment, which means prisoners should be working in prison to cover these costs. A prisoner who works 8 hours a day, 5 days a week should be covering those costs no matter what the work is. If there is no work for them to do that is our fault and we can’t expect then to pay. However, that does not eliminate the debt. They should also be able to work outside of prison, and if capable of earning more than a living wage use some portion of the remainder to paying off the debt they incurred. We did not force these people to commit crimes, they owe us the cost of making our society whole again.
We did not voluntarily create the need for the services, the criminals did. We are better off with certain people behind bars, but they are the ones that created that need and they should pay for it.
So far all we have gotten is a massive prison population with criminals otherwise deemed to be imprisoned being released due to overcrowding and a massive bill to pay for that. We also have high recidivism rates, and a general disregard for our justice system that adds to a very high crime rate.
This system does not work. So far I have seen that people working to support themselves and paying their debts works pretty well. It’s the system all the law abiding citizens use, why is that not good enough for the criminals?
I don’t expect any miracles would happen, but I expect we could stop throwing away money and lives on a failed system.
We already consider mitigating the costs of this system to be important, that’s why we have plea deals. But that’s a system where once we increase our costs while decreasing the cost to the criminals.
There are people who are unjustly imprisoned that is another problem. There are not jobs for those who leave prison and that is another problem. Those things don’t change the basic principle that everyone should be paying their way through life and committing a crime is not an out for that.
So you only support this for the rich?
No, I support it for everyone within their means. And the lack of means for most criminals is another issue. There should be jobs available for everyone who needs to work. Our failure to see to that is no reason to relieve criminals of their debt, we will just not be able to collect much from them.
Other developed nations also use the so-called “free ride system”, i.e., not charging prisoners for the costs of incarceration, and their results are much better. Why is that?
[QUOTE=TriPolar]
The failure to ensure jobs are available before and after the crimes are committed is a different issue altogether and is in no way addressed by giving prisoners free room and board and not requiring them to attempt to repay their debt to society.
[/QUOTE]
I think you’re fundamentally misunderstanding the concept of a criminal’s “debt to society”.
It’s the very fact of serving a sentence for a crime that is traditionally considered to pay a criminal’s debt to society. It’s got nothing to do with money.
The way you’re heading, we might as well bring back weregeld right away and be done with it. If you insist on considering a criminal’s debt to society as monetary, then just let them pay for their crime monetarily the way we used to, and skip the whole inconvenient and cumbersome process of incarceration altogether.
What other countries do is irrelevant because we are using their system and it doesn’t work for us. And the reasons it doesn’t work for us have nothing to do with criminals repaying society for the cost of their crimes.
We should only be incarcerating people to protect the public. Punishment as payment for a crime only increases the societal cost. If someone steals something and they can afford to pay back the owner in entirety for his loss then it would be stupid to incarcerate him, and stupider still because we are increasing the societal cost of his crime instead of decreasing it. When the criminal must be incarcerated as a result of his crime to protect the public he still owes us for the cost of that incarceration. That cost does not magically disappear because he is being punished. I see no reason at all to have punishment in the process when repayment is being ignored. People should be in prison because they are a danger to society, not as punishment. They should be able to work while incarcerated to cover their cost to society if they have no other means to do so. There is no benefit to taking non-productive citizens and then punishing them by forcing them to be non-productive while we cover their cost of living.
What you are arguing about is not really what the OP is about. It might be a worthwhile debate, but the essence of the OP is concern about prisoners being sued, after the fact, for costs associated with their imprisonment. Is that something you think is OK?
It shouldn’t be a problem but it is. For some reason people do not expect criminals to have to cover the cost of their imprisonment so it’s not reasonable to assume that the criminals are aware of this at sentencing. I really don’t see anything wrong in expecting everybody to pay for their costs of living but since it is not the common practice it feels like an ex post facto addition to their sentence which would be basically unfair.
Again, I think this is a bad policy, but you can’t very well sue them for the costs before the fact.
I’m okay with it. If people have the ability to pay, they should pay. If they do not, then they should not. This is determined by the lawsuit and the process is outlined in the law that has been on the books for years. Should Martha Stewart pay for her incarceration if she were in that jurisdiction? Yes. It’s part of the penalty of conviction.
Perhaps this could be more clearly communicated.
They could announce an estimated rate - this doesn’t seem to be an insurmountable problem.
A reasonable cost per day of imprisonment can be arrived at before the fact and they can be expected to owe for however many days it turns out to be.