Prison Costs: Bill Taxpayers or Inmates?

[JakeD]

JOLIET, Ill. -- Officials in one Illinois county want to change state law so they can bill criminals for their stay in the county jail. The Will County Board has asked its lobbyist to push for the change so all counties can try to recoup jail costs.

The county auditor proposed the plan after hearing about its success in a county near Detroit. He said taxpayers shouldn't have to foot the bill for criminals' room and board. Officials said they'd likely charge inmates on a sliding scale based on ability to pay -- with the lowest rate being $6 a night.

Critics argue inmates are already paying by losing their freedom. And a spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois said the state has a "moral obligation" to care for the people it's incarcerated.

This seems like a tough issue right off the bat. The critics' argument that people "are already paying by losing their freedom" doesn't hold much water with me, since if they hadn't broken the law in the first place, they wouldn't have to lose their freedom for whatever period of time.

On one hand, the ACLU is absolutely right about the state being obligated to care for the people that they've incarcerated, but on the other hand....a lot of people get charged for the fire department/ambulance having to visit the premises....so where do you go on a debate like that?

What do you think about the situation?

[Evilpoptart]

Simple, they should be put to work to pay the costs of keeping them fed/clothed. Its pretty simple. Just because your behind bars doesnt mean you also don't ever have to break a sweat.

Also a good thing about making them work, is when and if they get released, any extra earnings over and above the costs for keeping them interned, they could receive upon release, like a savings or something.

Instead of leaving prison with nothing, at least maybe they would have something to start a new life with. Well, that, or to do a bunch of coke with :P

[Thaum1el]

I think it's also quite simple - if you're so keen on keeping the criminals behind bars, you shuold also pay for the possibility. I doubt the criminals would have been there if they could choose.

Of course, while they are in there, they shuold be put to work. But I belong to the kind of people that believe that food and shelter is a basic right of a human being (as it says in the declaration of human rights).

It feels more like a way to keep prisoners, but not having to pay the costs it brings. Sorry people, doesn't work that way. If you serisouly don't want to pay much cash for taking care of the weak links of society, try to pass a bill that makes all crime pay by exectution - it only costs a bullet. It's not humane either, but at least it's being honest about it.

[Amaurote]

Yep, I have to agree with Thaum, really - and incidentally, nearly all inmates want to work, and are constantly looking for jobs within the establishment, either to vary their dull routine or just to earn extra pennies. I don't know much about the BoP system, but I would guess that like most penal systems it implements an Earnings and Privilege scheme to keep inmates on their toes. What is clear about the US system is that it has a certain notoriety for using inmate labour as an industrial product - which sounds great until you remember the workers in America whose economic existence is imperilled by the flood of peon labour.

This proposal isn't new, either - like most supposedly right-wing proposals, it takes us back to the fifteenth century, when everyone paid for their prison board. Of course, if you're a rich criminal with a gigantic empire founded on organized pimping, fraud and gangmastering, all of this will be music to your ears. What they're really afraid of are measures to confiscate illegal criminal gains - that is a measure I fully support, because it cuts crime off at its roots.

Thaum's scandinavian model is the way to go, though: lock up the very few hardcore offenders forever, concentrate on non-custodial measures for petty criminals.

[Poseidon]

But I belong to the kind of people that believe that food and shelter is a basic right of a human being (as it says in the declaration of human rights).


They can have their basic rights all they want. I just want MY basic right not to pay for THEIR shit.

[Amaurote]

This is going to be hopelessly bureaucratic, I guarantee you. If it's based on ability to pay, you're simply going to be paying civil servants to spend hundreds of hours a week processing claims from the welfare system to pay for BoP receipts.

[Mr. Bojangles]

AHH...the root of the problem. As a fully authorized, card carrying, gun-totin' soldier for the MAN, I wonder if maybe Thaum has a good point. I ain't sayin that we should execute people for jay-walking, but maybe if the death penalty was expanded just a bit, say for rape, indeceny with children(little kids, not 14 year olds), and gum-spitting.....I really hate gum spitters.

[Thaum1el]

They can have their basic rights all they want. I just want MY basic right not to pay for THEIR shit.

Sure thing, mate. But that is going to happenb anyway. If you have a society with X number of people in it, you will have y% (+/- z% depending on the society) of criminal elements, as people are bsically not built for utopia. And whatever we do with these criminal elements they are still going to cost money.

So, we can either choose, be humane and pay or be inhumane and pay. Choose your alternative, based on principle :P

[Mekanikos]

They should be charged. Most of them chose to break the law, and added fines on top of all that could possibly deter them, or fail and drive them back into crime...

[Amaurote]

Fines aren't going to deter drug addicts for one second, though. And most crime is drug-related.

From half a millennia to now, note that prison populations are mainly comprised of poor people. I'd feel more content about loosing punitive measures against petty criminals if society had tried a bit harder to equalize opportunity. But most electorates are lazy, and nearly all politicians are venal, so I suppose we're going to have to continue mopping up the consequences of our own short-termism.

[jackwright]

If you want o get the cost of incarceration down, the first thing to do would be to make the nations penal institutions a place to put, teach and rehabilitate real criminals. As opposed warehouses to stockpile free thinkers and/or the eyesores of society that can't afford a top rate scumbag litigators, or those who have managed to rub some cop, prosecutor or pissant member of the local power structure the wrong way somewhere along the line.

Consequently, that isn't going to happen untill you take corporate greed out of the entire penal equation. Like it or not, prison is big business in Amerika.

You want to get the cost of prisons down, let about 80 percent of the inhabitants go. They shouldn't be there in the first place. Then you could let about 95 percent of the support and admin go too. They are as much, or more, of a burden to the taxpayer anyway.

[Thaum1el]

They should be charged. Most of them chose to break the law, and added fines on top of all that could possibly deter them, or fail and drive them back into crime...
If a fine would do anything, to a person that comes out without a job, but with a big warning sign in his forhead for future employers, it will probably be that he is even worse off than without - that is - he can't get a job and he got fines. So he might as well start burglarizing, cause he still has to eat. As I said, if it has any effect at all.