Most of a nation on probation?

[zenadmen at zenadmen.com]

On 5 Jul 2001, at 3:59, Sampo Syreeni wrote:

> On Wed, 4 Jul 2001, Eric Cordian wrote:
> 
> >If everyone refused plea bargaining, and refused parole, the number of
> >people who could be prosecuted and jailed would be a small fraction of
> >those who are "in the system" today.
> 
> I think the relative cost of parole vs. completing the sentence is the
> pertinent question -- the parole system can be a wonderful thing, as Sandy
> says, but the government should never be able to reduce costs by using it.
> There should be paroles, but their cost should somehow be forced to the same
> level as serving the time behind bars. After that the only reason to let
> someone out would be the balance between the prospect of rehabilitation vs.
> risk taken.

If a non-expert may interject.. while I can't judge how realistic it 
would be to repeal laws or to do some of the other things 
mentioned in this thread, it seems to me that "making parole cost 
less" would be defeated by the simple economics of spending x to 
house someone, and not spending x not to. Like I say, I'm not 
intimate with the details of costs of prisons or of monitoring 
parolees - is there more to it than that? It seems like it would be 
too artificial to simply add costs where there aren't any.

sparkane

> 
> Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy, mailto:decoy at iki.fi, gsm: +358-50-5756111
> student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front