If we *MUST* have commercial i.e. paid prisons
(which are a horrible idea for a bunch of reasons) – we should at the very least only pay them for the inmates who do not reoffend.. a steadily increasing bonus for every year the inmate remains crime-free.
This might incline the creators of such institutions to try to build prisons that heal people, instead of prisons that make them sicker.
July 11th, 2016 at 9:12 am
That’s a great idea! You get what you celebrate, and in this case, what you pay bonuses for.
In trying to find the other side of this coin, how would a commercial prison cheat at this? The first option would be to artificially extend sentences of those that they believe will re-offend, which might actually be a net positive. The second would be to transfer expected re-offenders to other facilities prior to release, to remove them from their own bonus schedule. Third, which I doubt could be sustained, would be to stage accidental death for expected re-offenders. The greater difficulty is in how the prison labels one an expected re-offender. It could be greatly unjust if those expectations are race-based or some other personal bias (not that current systems are any better).