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lululu comments on A Proposal for Defeating Moloch in the Prison Industrial Complex - Less Wrong Discussion
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Perhaps instead of the prison, the ex-prisoner should be given the financial incentive to avoid recidivism. Reward good behavior, rather than punish bad.
We could do this by providing training, and given them reasonable jobs. HA HA! I make myself laugh. Sigh.
It seems to me the issue is less one of recidivism, and more one of the prison-for-profit machine. Rather than address it by trying to make them profit either way (they get paid if the prisoner returns already - this is proposing they get paid if they stay out) - it seems simpler to remove profit as a motive (ie. if the state is gonna lock you up - the state has to deal with it, nobody should be doing it as a business). Not that the state is likely to have a better record here.
My take is that we would be better off spending that money on education and health care for the poor, as an effort to avoid having crime be seen as an easy way out of poverty. Ooh, my inner hippie is showing. Time to go hug a tree.
Fully agreed that this incentive would also be well spent on programs directly for the prisoner. Unfortunately, there is no way that you could convince law makers to consider this. Imagine the headlines: "My Rapist Is Payed More than Me," "Go Directly to Jail, Collect $200", "Pennsylvania Begins New Steal to Earn Program," "Don't Qualify for Student Loans? Steal a Car!"
People are more comfortable if the money goes to some intermediary. I would expect prisons are the best group to insensitivize because they have the captive audience. If job training works, prisons can earn money by providing job training. If they need reasonable jobs, it would be in the prison's interest to make ties with recruiters or hire a full time job seeker on the prisoner's behalf.
For the record, also agreed that education and health care are great preventative expenditures but that is a different system for reforming and one with a lot of partisan lines in the sand. I think it would be disproportionately difficult to use incentives to reform those areas because facts don't matter when partisanism starts happening.