Should Justice Have a Price?
ST. LOUIS — When judges here sentence convicted criminals, a new and unusual variable is available for them to consider: what a given punishment will cost the State of Missouri.
For someone convicted of endangering the welfare of a child, for instance, a judge might now learn that a three-year prison sentence would run more than $37,000 while probation would cost $6,770. A second-degree robber, a judge could be told, would carry a price tag of less than $9,000 for five years of intensive probation, but more than $50,000 for a comparable prison sentence and parole afterward. The bill for a murderer’s 30-year prison term: $504,690.
I certainly think doctors and patients should know the costs of alternative approaches when they make health-care decisions. So I guess this makes sense too. When a judge is on the fence about alternative punishments, why not choose the less expensive one?
Categories: My Blog
dWj
I don’t like the title of this post. Should the Earth have gravity? It does. Whether we should pretend that it does not is a reasonable question, but I’m not sure asking whether it should makes sense.
Brian
Outsource prisons for violent crime to the lowest bidder. Probably would cost less than $5k a year.
Jess
We’ve started doing that, and now private enterprises, in addition to the prison guards’ unions that have long fought for their place at the trough, are constantly lobbying for stricter sentencing. Do not want.
dave
I support any measure that has the potential to reduce public expenditure, as long as we’re not significantly trading off public safety. More importantly, and this applies to healthcare as well, why is cost so high to begin with and how can we reduce those expenses? In this regard I agree with Brian. Privatizing gov’t run prisons should be an effective way to reduce operating costs of correctional facilities. If the choice is between a gov’t facility in collusion with public-sector unions and a private one in opposition to private-sector unions, I think the decision is pretty clear. Of course, tilting the negotiating field away from big labor would be the ideal solution, but I don’t see that happening anytime soon.
Jess Austin
To clarify, when prisons are private, both prison operators and guards’ unions lobby for stricter sentencing. The false choice of “public” unions vs. “private” unions (how do we consider these private if they’re paid from a government contract?) and their employers is one we should reject outright. The point is to spend less public money oppressing citizens, not to argue about who signs the checks. I didn’t bring up the unions so we could all decry the general concept of unionization, but rather to point out the specific harms that these particular unions have caused.
If you share my concern about public expenditure, please wake up and pay attention to what is happening in this country. I’ve linked to this hideous graph before. Over the last 25 years, a time frame over which all crime has decreased, these special interests have been able to quadruple, quintuple, and sextuple their taxpayer-funded budgets. We probably can’t do much about how the pigs at the trough choose to organize, but we certainly can do something about the climate of fear and innumeracy that leads the public to abide these obscene budgets.
dave
Jess, you’ve been champing at the bit to use those crimal justice stats for a while now. Congratulations on finally working it into the comments.
Your argument presumably rests on one of libertarianism’s central planks: drug legalization. Certainly, this is a worthy cause that has the potential to vastly unburden public budgets on a multitude of fronts including prison and law enforcement. But given the current reality of onerous prohibition laws unlikely to be overturned on a national scale for decades at minumum, finding the cheapest alternatives for criminal justice seems a reasonable endeavor. And what better place to start than the private sector.
You claim that a union’s employer (public vs. private) is irrelevant since ultimately they all suck from the taxpayers’ teat. I disagree that this is a “false choice.” Privately operated prisons and their union guards certainly rent seek by lobbying for stiffer sentences. But what makes you think publically managed prisons are any less culpable? Are local politicians, who ostensibly are in an even better position to leverage public funds, any less eager to bring gov’t largesse to their districts? Private lobbyists can be very persuasive, but I fear the influence and spendthrift of a politician seeking re-election far more.
Add to this the invariable collusion that develops between gov’t and its union employees and it becomes a budgetary nightmare. Gov’t agencies provide little resistance to union demands as they are beholden to virtually no one. At very least a privately operated prison would make attempts to thwart excessive union demands or face the shareholders’ discontent.
Finally, in theory these private contracts would be awarded to the lowest bidder. In pursuit of a larger profit, such prisons would find innovative ways to reduce cost. This incentive is entirely absent in a public facility.
You may think focusing on prison operating costs is simply a distraction from the larger issue of “citizen oppression” and our country’s “climate of fear.” Razing these liberty stifling institutions is a noble cause, but in the meantime prison privatization could effectively nibble at the edges of our elected officials’ fiscal excess.
dave
Jess Austin said, “Over the last 25 years, a time frame over which all crime has decreased, these special interests have been able to quadruple, quintuple, and sextuple their taxpayer-funded budgets.”
Are you implying that these budgets have been growing DESPITE reduced rates of crime? I’m wary of any public program that sextuples its budget over 25 years, but I read crime has decreased BECAUSE we’ve spent massive amounts of money on police and incarceration. Again, it’s debatable whether the cost justifies the benefit (community safety is valued differently by everyone), but this significant reduction in crime does coincide nicely with the increased spending… http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm
Don’t misinterpret this as even tepid support for the “police-prison-industrial complex.” I’m certainly no advocate of unrestrained public spending. But this fiscal splurge has resulted in less crime as would be expected when you lock up more criminals for longer sentences.
Jess Austin
If one accepts the conventional definitions of and attitudes towards “crime”, I can see how one could justify any amount of spending and persecution, if only crime went down by some measure. Then again, one who felt that way could justify any amount of spending and persecution when crime goes up by some measure, because then we’d be “falling behind”. It’s a bit of a catch-22, and we’re not left with much help in deciding how much spending and persecution is enough. This is in addition to the fact that this sort of post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning is considered by many to be fallacious and unsupportable in a social science context. I’d prefer to look at demographic trends, and say that in a slowly growing and aging population, we would expect crime to decrease even if police spending remained static.
I don’t accept conventional definitions of and attitudes toward crime. Private consensual actions with no directly-physically-harmed victims (drug sales, immigration, critical speech, gray-market provision of goods and services that ignores regulations, etc.) shouldn’t be considered crimes. The cardinality of the set of legislated crimes should be static at worst, if not actually decreasing. New exploits, when they fall under preexisting categories like fraud or theft, should be policed under those categories. If they don’t fall under those categories, they are not and should not be crimes, but of course they can be controlled through contracts and private security measures, if that is seen as cost-effective. (I.e., I consider any law the title of which contains the word “cyber” to be bad law.) With this set of preferences, of course I feel that far less should be spent on law enforcement and far fewer people should be imprisoned than we have currently. A return to 1982 levels of spending and incarceration would be a good start, but hardly sufficient.
I don’t see much hope for that idiosyncratic dream, but I do think we can at least challenge the political/media dynamic of constant increases in fear and spending, regardless of actual crime levels. On current trends, we’re going to have 40% of the workforce employed in health care, 30% in law enforcement, and 20% in education. That doesn’t leave much for consensual goods and services, much less for innovation. A nation that spends all of its resources on activities that by definition cannot see productivity gains, is a nation that will not prosper.
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