Sampo Syreeni
But just as Tim argues, the latter always involves cost-effectiveness too...There should always be a sufficient, predictable cost associated with putting people away to guard against criminalization for convenience, prudence and political gain only.
I'm sure that "cost-effectiveness" has a role to play here. I just don't agree that the cost savings of parole are all that big a factor. The US has more prisoners per capital than just about anyone (I think the US is surpassed by Russia and maybe South Africa). So we've already made the decision that we can afford to lock up a lot of people.
The disparity in numbers is largely due to the way we treat the mentally ill. "They" (Russia, and most of europe) don't count the numbers of people forcebly institutionalized for "mental illness" as part of their prisoner counts, and here in the US the government *usually* doesn't forcibly institutionalize someone until after they've committed a crime, or at least been convicted of a crime of some sort, whether it really should be a crime.
Also, the assumption that locking up more people comes at some sort of linear increase in costs. One of the simplest answers is to just overcrowd the facilities "we" already have.
Simple answers are for simple problems or simple people. This is not a simple problem.
No, I think Tim and Sampo have the cart before the horse. We have the criminal laws we have because that feeds the government, not because we save so much with parole. Eliminating parole by overcrowding or by building still more prisons would increase, not decrease human suffering.
I think you're both wrong. We have increasingly more laws because we don't have enough problems for our elected leaders to deal with, and in order to justify their pay checks they feel they need to "Be Doing Something", so they manufacture one crisis after another, propose and half-ass implement some nit-wit solution. The problem is that dimwitted idiots keep re-electing these rotten sonsabitches.
Honestly, would you rather wear a ankle transponder or be Bruno's bitch?
CypherPrisonSluts? -- http://www.apa.org/journals/psp/psp7761121.html It is one of the essential features of such incompetence that the person so afflicted is incapable of knowing that he is incompetent. To have such knowledge would already be to remedy a good portion of the offense.