Inmates at no-smoking prison trade hostage for cigarettes
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/02/28/cigarettes.hostages.ap/index.html
If they take hostages and demand cigarettes, then by all means give them cigarettes and blindfolds. Then shoot them. Problem solved.
Burning at the stake would be a more appropriate punishment.
Actually, that’s my winter project. Everywhere but where I am has lots of snow for skiing. Since December, I’ve been trying to find the person who offended the Snow Gods, so that I can nail them to their skis, and then burn them as a sacrificial offering. Unfortunately, neither I nor my compadres have found the culprit yet. We’re on the hunt, though.
Yea, pretty simplistic. Such is eradication justfication. They will penalize further and demonize those in Noncon (formity). Defcon 1 in our utter Neurosis and psychopathy as a nation.
I say let the prisoners smoke.
… why? Because it supposedly cuts down on riots, it gives them something to work for, a privledge to be revoked, and saves taxpayer money when they die sooner.
Also, I smoke, and am afraid of going to prison 
No, it doesn’t save money, because they don’t just up and die. They get sick, and linger for a long while, with expensive medical treatment, before they finally die.
Maybe you have a point, but how much do they really spend on those treatments? They have “house” doctors. Paging Qadgop?
I mean, if it costs roughly $30k to confine a prisoner for a year and it cuts them short by 7 years… uh… where’s the break even point?
There’s one common element in all that… Guess who? ^^
^^
Don’t forget the cost of the cigarettes themselves.
Let’s say packs cost $4 each and each smoking prisoner is smoking a pack a day. There are 2,186,230 people in prison in the U.S. We’ll say 29.1% of prisoners smoke (I’m getting this number from here as the percent of people below the poverty line who smoke, which is more likely to represent the prison population than the national average).
Total cost of cigarettes: ~ $929 million/year. Nearly a billion bucks.
Of course, you could make them pay for it themselves, as prisoners are generally allowed very small expense accounts that can be used to buy things such as toothbrushes etc. Probably the way to go, as although I don’t care if prisoners are smoking or not, I don’t want to be paying for it.
From what QtM has mentioned in other threads, they get the best possible treatment. They get treatment that might not be available if they weren’t in prison. And when the treatment has to be outside the prison, the cost of transportation and guards has to be added to it.
Hmmm… I guess I can buy that.
So prisons still pay the roughly average $1,000 retail for an MRI?
If so, yeah, that sucks.
But even given that, I’m stilll “iffy” on not letting the prisoners smoke for afformentioned reasons.
edit: Hypothetically, if you work 10 hours for seven cents an hour, after a week, I think you deserve a pack of smokes, if that’s what you want to spend it on. Isn’t healthcare even built into that?
All our prisons are now smoke-free. That’s 23,000 inmates who can’t smoke. Also about 8000 staff that can’t have tobacco products on state grounds either.
No riots, no disturbances. Some bitchiness, some felon-penned lawsuits which didn’t go anywhere. Some staff fired for bringing tobacco in repeatedly despite the ban.
I expect we’ll see health-care cost savings in the long run. Lung cancer is expensive to treat, and taking care of lots of folks with advanced emphysema eats up a lot of time, too.
And inmates are entitled to the same standard of health care as non-incarcerated people, at taxpayer expense. I can’t do chemo or radiation in my office, so they go to the University Hospital, or one of the other centers we’ve contracted to care for them. With guards, shackles, etc. That ain’t cheap.
We used to pay the hospitals and outside specialists whatever they charged. That’s because the State was stupid, and in an earlier ‘cost containment’ move they eliminated the staff which used to review bills and fees to see if they were correct.
But now we’ve contracted to pay only medicare rates to any outside provider, unless they have a contract with us saying we’ll pay more. And we have hired folks to scrutinize every health care bill we get to see if charges are correct. Big surprise: We get incorrectly overcharged a LOT.
I work in the prison system’s intake facility. Over 8000 inmates come to our prison a year, more than half of them were smokers prior to their incarceration. They all go cold turkey; we supply no patches, gum, or other drugs to help them over it. And I see about 1 medical complaint a year about this. That’s it. Frankly, withdrawing from nicotine is not that big of an additional stressor, considering that they are adjusting to being in a maximum security prison.
Our prisons are tobacco free, for inmates and staff. Tobacco inside the prisons is considered contraband, just like alcohol or illicit drugs. Which is as it should be.
You guys are missing the big point. It wasn’t our idea to ban smoking. It was the prisoners who got that ball rolling. Groups of non-smoking prisoners have filed lawsuits saying they were being forced to live in a smoking environment that was having an ill effect on their health. In virtually every resulting court decision, judges ordered us to provide non-smoking environments. The only realistic way to do this is to ban all indoor smoking in prisons.