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Comment by derekdahmer | Hacker News Reader

That would work but incarceration is an unscalable solution. Some CA stats:

  - $71k/person/year
  - 130,000 inmates
  - 135% of capacity 
  - highest rate of incarceration in the world

We're maxed out - and all this doesn't even solve the root issues of mental illness and poverty. We need alternative ideas with better ROI.

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Well, Gulag was profitable AFAIK

Sure. But what are these alternatives? 1% of the population are psychopaths and no one knows how to make them not be so. What else can we do but put them away?

Either why aren't 1% of people psychopaths in other developed nations or alternatively why are these 1% behaving in other nations.

The easy solution is prison but its also crazy expensive both in terms of raw cost and societal cost (broken up families, addiction, developing gang ties in jail, recidivism, opportunity cost of taking a working age person out of the job pool).

IMO there is no politically easy solution or we would have already done it. Society has to change how it views criminals and invest resources in the things that increase the likelihood of crime. For example, rich psychopaths commit a lot less violent crime than poor psychopaths. Social services, addiction counseling, education, etc help. But its extremely hard to convince people more resources should go to helping criminals vs punishing them.

Maybe we should figure out why they are "psychopaths", rather than locking them up and throwing away the key?

Hahah, apparently this is a controversial suggestion. Never realized HN is so right-wing.

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