TIL: Today I Learned
- Thread starter Cutlass
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I'm not seeing the problem. Why should tax payers have to bear the burden of supporting those who break society's laws? Most prisoners also have some sort of job assigned to them while in prison that pays a meager wage, so those wages probably just go to paying for their prison stay.
They're paying for society's collective failure to prevent laws being broken in the first place.
The laws are there for the collective benefit of society, so it stands to reason that the upkeep should also be paid collectively.
Prisoners are part of that collective, are they not? It only seems fair then that they should bear at least some of the cost of their incarceration as well. Which I'm sure is the case. I highly doubt prisons that charge prisoners for their stay rely solely on those fees to stay operational.
Snerk
Smeghead
More incentive for the conservative penal lobby to aim for longer incarceration and for lesser crimes. Prisoners are big business in the US. Not only do prisons get subsidised by amount of inmates, they have access to virtually free labour as well. Add to that a fixed income from the prisoners themselves and this thing is looking pretty lucrative for penitentiaries owners. All they have to do is lobby for a steady flow of new prisoners at any cost. No country comes close to locking up as many as the US do. I don't see that changing any time soon. Not as long as the money keep flowing, and jailing people are good for business these days it seems.
Privately owned prisons are a very small portion of the US corrections system. There are currently 4,575 prisons in the US and only 131 of those are privately owned. So I doubt the "penitentiaries owners" have that much political pull within the US.
Snerk
Smeghead
In 2013, there were 133,000 state and federal prisoners housed in privately owned prisons in the US, constituting 8.4% of the overall US prison population. The prison industry as a whole took in over $5 billion in revenue in 2011. I'd say there's political pull there for sure.
Just wondering why they would give any significant amount of consideration to private prisons when they are such a small part of the corrections system. I mean, the government pretty much has a monopoly on prison revenue seeing as they control 99% of the prisons in the US. All they have to start doing is charging inmates to stay there and they could generate way more revenue on their own than they could with the tax revenue from the private prison companies.
SS-18 ICBM
Oscillator
TIL tacticool reflex sights actually date back to 1900.
My point was that, if prisoners are a source of income for the state, then politicians will be encouraged to keep making penal policy harsher on offenders.
Oh. Well in that case, yeah I agree with you.
jackelgull
An aberration of nature
TIL that Civfanatics has a wiki. And it is horrible. I'm so glad I don't have a page on it.
cybrxkhan
Asian Xwedodah
It's also kinda outdated as it has a lot of old posters. Dachs? Ghostwriter? Damn, those were the days.
I wonder who made it, though. D:
madviking
north american scum
that's like the third iteration too. there are like two which predate that one.
Lohrenswald
世界的 bottom ranked physicist
Mentioning it is actually forbidden 
cybrxkhan
Asian Xwedodah
TIL the guy who plays Jim on The Office is over six feet.
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