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Subjectively, I feel like my local incarceration rate is way too low. Given the endemic property crime, illegal encampments ruining public spaces and open hard drug selling and use. Some enormous societal failure has occurred. Step one on the long road to fixing it is institutionalizing the crazy homeless people rather than letting them self medicate with hard drugs while living in filth and stealing to afford more drugs. And imprisoning the non-crazy ones.
I am not very invested in Canada's incarceration rates. If this boosts our incarceration ratio to 8x of Canada's, so be it. We have a real problem with the cost per prisoner per year. I'm open to building much cheaper prisons or paying 3rd world countries to house our prisoners.
Agree 100%
Also hard-agree (though I do think some consideration to their well being is still warranted)
I become skeptical that the problem is this simple. Maybe 8x Canada will fix it, but what if you have to go further? What if you have to get up to 10x, 15x 20x? Are you willing to pay that cost?
I bring up the comparison just because it seems like other countries do better, or at least not much worse, while having much lower incarceration rates. If you think that the nature of the US makes it impossible, what factors make it so?
We aren't other countries. Sure Japanese people live long healthy lives with lower medical spending. And if our nation was composed of Japanese people then we would too. But we aren't and won't be, so nevermind.
We are a strangely violent people. Even excluding gun crime we have very high violent crime rates compared to other developed countries. I'm not clear what factors cause this. The good news is we don't have to root cause our problems to get rid of junkie encampments in major cities.
My understanding is that a fairly small number of serial offenders commit a majority of quality of life crimes. I believe a modest increase in the prison population could fix these problems. I don't think it would take extremes like multiplying the prison population.
Doing a bit of googling I see that my state spends 2.2% of its budget on incarceration. I would gladly bear a 2.2% tax increase to fix these problems. Again, not that I think we need to go to the extreme of doubling the prison population. But if we had to it would be very affordable.
It didn't work before, but it might work now!
Repeating that logic is how the US got into this situation.
I'm not saying don't lock the serial offenders up! But there needs to be better planning on how to target and convict them specifically. There's a high risk of collateral damage to people who are essentially harmless.
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Our sizable underclass of drug-addled, criminally-inclined, antisocial losers, many of whom come from broken homes and shitty communities. As Europe imports the third world, I expect it to struggle with many of the same issues.
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