Most of a nation on probation?

[Sampo Syreeni]

On Wed, 4 Jul 2001, Sandy Sandfort wrote:

>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.

Yep, the US does lock a whole lot of people up. But what about the constant
whining about "overflowing prisons", then. Or the many instants where
prisoners are put on parole en masse to cut costs and/or to free up prison
real estate? That sort of thing isn't about a decision to invest a lot into
incarceration, but precisely the kind of thing that one day makes everyone a
parolee.

>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.

There would be ways to control this too. One way is to make it possible for
inmates to sue for damage due to overcrowding and the violence it causes.
This would make for a superlinear increase in cost, and eventual balancing
in the density of inmates.

>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.

*Of course* parole isn't the initial cause, but it's one of the few enabling
factors which allow excess criminalization of harmless conduct to be at
least partially quenched. The usual reasons for legislative bloat stop us
from pruning the code directly, but a strong strawman can be made for not
letting people out of the slammer before their term is up.

>Eliminating parole by overcrowding or by building still more prisons would
>increase, not decrease human suffering.

That's really just the age old question of whether two people suffering half
as much each constitutes the same amount of total suffering. From the
standpoint of individual freedom, one might argue that more people are now
hurting. You would probably say the maximum harm/injustice done is now less.
I still think that in the first case the probability of a given person being
unjustly imprisoned is doubled, and this is bad.

>Honestly, would you rather wear a ankle transponder or be Bruno's bitch?

As you already put it, given a chance, neither. But the real point is that
transponders shouldn't be an option *and* the cost of putting people away
should be high enough to become prohibitive for anything but the most
serious of crimes. If this was to come to pass, the question would instead
become "would you rather be free with your rights intact than wear a tag?".

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