Hacker News Reader

Comment by tokai | Hacker News Reader

Its really expensive to have people sitting on death row?

Shit. Yeah that’s it and is retrospectively obvious. The prisons probably are responsible for operating under their assigned budgets, which means they need to literally kill off their liabilities.

I wonder what correlations exist between prison profitability and inmate death rates.

At least as of 2009, no state housed death row inmates in private prisons: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/24/us/24prison.html. In Alabama, death row inmates are housed and executed in Holman, a public facility. Moreover, Alabama has just 1% of its prison population in private prisons. Many states that have the death penalty (Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Kansas, etc.) have no private prisons at all.

That’s good, but not contradictory of the point above. A public, not for profit prison presumably still has to operate on a budget. I did say “profitability”, but I suppose I really meant ability to operate.

If prisons are held accountable to their finances, which I assume they are, they’re put into a position where expensive inmates who are budgeted to die must die, else they threaten the entire prison.

I'd be of the opinion that anyone who uses expense as a justification here is less morally balanced than most of the people on death row.

Death row is very expensive. In part because the types of people up for death are high risk and so they have to pay for more security (guards, locks and even fire protection). In part because death row sees the most appeals so lawyers keeping them in cost more.

I wonder if it is $775 per day?

Where the heck did you pull that number from? Also why are you posing it as a question?

The closest thing I see from google is "Trump's Child Detention Camps Cost $775 Per Person Every Day" which is unrelated to this discussion.

Just for kicks and giggles: I wonder if it's $1337.995 per day?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com