How moronic does a society have to be to agree to pay taxes to keep people in jail who don’t need to be there but not to pay taxes for actual firefighters? In California, they are arguing that they can’t release prisoners because they need them to put out wildfires.
It’s supposed to be cheaper this way.
Out of California’s years-long litigation over reducing the population of prisons deemed unconstitutionally overcrowded by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2010, another obstacle to addressing the U.S. epidemic of mass incarceration has emerged: The utility of cheap prison labor.
In recent filings, lawyers for the state have resisted court orders that they expand parole programs, reasoning not that releasing inmates early is logistically impossible or would threaten public safety, but instead that prisons won’t have enough minimum security inmates left to perform inmate jobs.
The debate culminated Friday, when a three-judge federal panel ordered California to expand an early parole program. California now has no choice but to broaden a program known as 2-for-1 credits that gives inmates who meet certain milestones the opportunity to have their sentences reduced. But California’s objections raise troubling questions about whether prison labor creates perverse incentives to keep inmates in prison even when they don’t need to be there.
Does anyone seriously think it is cheaper to imprison someone than to pay them to be a firefighter? Anyone?
It only begins to make economic sense when you pay the inmate two dollars a day and you’re talking about an inmate who is already sentenced to a ludicrous term, and who will have his sentence reduced as partial compensation for fighting fires. Basically, the savings is in giving the state the excuse to reduce a sentence. But that could be done anyway.
So, now, California doesn’t want to give inmates any alternative ways to reduce their sentences because then they won’t have enough signing up to fight fires and they’ll have to go pay for actual firemen.
How about people stop moaning about paying taxes and pay them in a more sensible way that will actually save money?
If you want to let lots of people out of prison early, just don’t put new people in prison for so long in the first place.