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3
I believe this is what happens when you privatize prison. If someone is getting a kick back, everyone tied to that person on down is going to do their best to enforce dumb rules and keep the population 'high'. Gross. Funny enough... no mention of the cost of transition therapy for Chelsea Manning. That also factors into these costs.
2
I can assure you New York City's jails are quite public. They contract out for services like any other municipal entity, but they are run by the DOC.
Fair. I kind of shot off since I've heard of the prison industrial complex. Don't prisons make money with more prisoners? Or am I misunderstanding the term? I have zero experience with jail or the criminal process.
3
Which is not to say that the bidding process couldn't be full of opportunities to divert public monies to private pockets without anything like a sufficient return in the public interest.
You'll get no argument from me there.
6
The sad thing is, most people's reaction will probably be to spend less money on the people in jail rather than reform the system correcting the reasons why people are in jail in the first place.
I can see it now: "$167,000?!?! Do they have armani jumpsuits? Make them wear burlap or nothing! 10 people to a cell! what kind of caviar gruel are they serving in there? low protein mush is all they deserve!"
2
How is that sad? Those people are in there to be punished for harming other people. The entire point of prison is to give people even more incentive to obey the law; both from people who've never been to prison wanting to stay out of prison, and from people who HAVE been to prison never wanting to go BACK to prison.
3
People are in jail because they commit crimes.
"Today, the No. 1 top crime of sentenced inmates is second-degree murder, with just over 8,000 convicts — about the same as in 2000."
http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/Roc…
You can argue the system should be reformed, but its not like NYC incarcerates a large number of drug offenders any more. Most people who get locked up in NYC have committed very serious offenses
4
Prison and jail time have been shown to not be a deterrent from people committing crimes (particularly the most dangerous offenders). Further, quality of life in prison is shown to have a greater effect on criminal behavior than the death penalty. Your premise is thus flawed for most of the people that you are afraid of.
The purpose of the prison system should be to rehabilitate rather than punish. It works for some people, but makes others worse.
2
Does it help? After 10, 20, or 25 years in jail are they better?
Does the reason for them being in jail change my premise? Why are they committing murder? How can we prevent the crimes? Second degree murder generally means that there wasn't premeditation.
Thinking about it a bit more, analyzing why there is so much money spent on per inmates could be a good idea — I'd imagine most of it isn't on making prison a supposedly cushy experience.
2
Yes, that is way too much money, but that's not each prisoner's fault. When we lock them up, we don't just throw them away. Prison is for rehabilitation. When that amount of money is being spent, it means many people have their hands out.
4
The only reason its that high is because NYC DOCs staff is massively overpaid. The $166K number is the corrections department budget divided by the amount of prisoners.
Over the past 10 years the prison population of NYC has progressively declined even as the DOC's budget has gotten biggerhttp://www.scoc.ny.gov/pop.htm. As such the high cost per prisoner. Most of that money is spent on pensions for retired guards.
The cost per prisoner in the NY state system is 55K per prisoner. The difference comes for the massively higher salaries drawn by city against state employees.
And believe me, they're doing something about bloated state pensions. The COs hate Gov. Cuomo right now because of this, even though most of them are grandfathered into the former system that allows them to count unlimited overtime (at 1.5x pay) in their pension calculation. It's just the new COs who are getting the far more sensible, but still quite generous deal where OT counts, but only up to a point.
My two nights in an NYC jail (#edgy) it was evident after a few hours that 95% of the people were there on petty drug violations and selling water bottles to tourists. Which I found to be a totally strange waste money until, looking around at all the brown faces behind bars, I realized the city's plan was actually succeeding splendidly. Very solid minority subjugation ROI.
