Sounds great, but who feels like paying for it?
The real issue isn't paying for it, it's administering it. We make it so difficult to to navigate the social safety net that it becomes a skill and the people who need help are frequently without that skill.
Just give it to everyone and increase taxes slightly (very slightly). We already have the whole "report income for taxes" part done, so just use that to increase taxes on those who would otherwise not be eligible, then give the benefit to everyone.
The net expense will be the same, except with much less administrative effort.
Thanks for your sacrifice. What if I am not willing to pay? Will I be sent in prison? That'd be pretty ironic.
If it were less, would you pay? Or is more of principal thing?
There is no paradox in that.
That's the irony.
That's the further irony.
You're already paying lots of money to keep too many people in prison. The poster back up the thread was simply suggesting a cheaper alternative that would save you money.
While this is probably a false equivalency and anecdotal, I'd like to point out that there are 2.3 million people in prison and it costs the US about $80bn/year. We have roughly 46 million people on food stamps and it costs us roughly $80 billion a year.
With the money wasted on prisons, mostly going into the pockets of private industry, I'd wager a large bet there's likely the amount needed to feed, cloth, and house them all within our currently wasted expenditures.
So the answer should be: all of us; because, we'd VERY likely be saving money and have a more functional society.
Unemployment and welfare can actually return up to 1.7x the amount disbursed in tax revenues. Obviously this factor reduces as the amount disbursed goes up as a proportion of overall GDP, but pales in comparison to e.g. tax cuts for corporations/wealthy which net much closer to zero - corporations simply move that money overseas or tax shelter it using things like "double irish with a dutch sandwich" schemes.
I hate it when people make this "who feels like paying for it," bullshit. Your money isn't what you think it is. Our current monetary systems (from coinage to fiat) all depend on creating debt and guilt (same word in German and Old English)and impose a moral obligation that keeps us serving a ruling class.
You're already paying for that person to be in prison, for the CIA to distribute weapons to people to start wars and for a massive war industry that then fights those people we give weapons to. Don't pretend you can vote with your money or that you can vote with your votes. The world is much more complicated than that.
Current prisons reinforce risk taking behaviors and can worsen behavioral disorders that can lead to crime in the outside, and violence in the inside.
>see if crime doesn't plummet
It doesn't take a PhD in economics to realize that attaching a profit motive to incarceration just might increase "crime" since a for-profit prison naturally wants to increase profits.
You also are shoehorning what I actually said into "hurr sure for-profit prisons are great" when I actually offered a critique and possible remedy to the problem at hand.
The prisons could easily be structured in such a way that penalties could be used when excons don't reintegrate well, and bonuses when they do. Bam, easy. Prisons aren't a business, even if money is involved. They are supposed to rehabilitate people, and I think there's plenty of work to be done in coming years to restructure how prisons operate, the rules that they need to play by, and strategies for correcting risk taking behavior in excons.
Yikes. You should really examine this topic in more detail:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/06/cca-private-pris...
>We could try to break up a fight if we wanted, he says, but since we won't have pepper spray or a nightstick, he wouldn't recommend it. "We are not going to pay you that much," he says emphatically. "The next raise you get is not going to be much more than the one you got last time. The only thing that's important to us is that we go home at the end of the day. Period. So if them fools want to cut each other, well, happy cutting."
>I ask one of the regular white-shirted COs what an average day in seg looks like. "To be honest with you, normally we just sit here at this table all day long," he tells me. They are supposed to walk up and down the eight tiers every 30 minutes to check on the inmates, but he says they never do that.
https://www.aclu.org/banking-bondage-private-prisons-and-mas...
>Private facilities have also been linked to atrocious conditions. In a juvenile facility in Texas, for example, auditors reported, "[c]ells were filthy, smelled of feces and urine."
I'll be sure to examine things with more detail, lmao
I think there's plenty of room for improvement for the prison system, and I've enjoyed discussing it with you. You have broadened my perspective on the issue
You guys make it sound like criminals are victims, like we should feel sorry for them or something. Sometimes what I read on HN scares me and makes me sick.
https://www.aol.com/article/news/2016/09/08/man-allegedly-ro...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/28/man-commits-crime-t...
http://www.wsfa.com/story/17695143/2012/04/24/homeless-man-i...
It's cheaper to pay for housing, food and medicine than housing, food, medicine and guards. And the former has the possibility of those people finding employment meaning we don't have to pay for them at all and actually benefit from their labor.
Also, obviously, not all crime is the same. Plenty of crime could never be prevented by any kind of policy. But there also is a lot of minor crime that probably could.
That said, crime isn't a silver-bullet-solution kind of problem. It's a systemic problem with a lot of causes, so any sort of broad stroke claim about what will and will not reduce crime is unlikely to be accurate.