[danShumway]

Are jails a cost-effective way of separating people from society?

I see a couple of problems:

- most prison terms are limited (any prison term for petty theft is going to be).

- prisons often release people into the same communities they came out of.

- it is tremendously expensive to even get someone into prison, you have to arrest them and either get them through a trial or at least pay for sentencing if they just plead guilty.

If the entire goal of prison is to separate offenders from society (which could be its own conversation, but whatever, we'll take it for granted that's the goal), we still kind of need to ask if prison is the best way of doing that.

[RobertMiller]

> Are jails a cost-effective way of separating people from society?

Optimizing for cost is not what you want. The most cost effective way of separating people from society is a summary execution with no trial. Prisons aren't meant to be the cheapest solution, they're meant to be a more humane compromise.

[danShumway]

We optimize for cost alongside other factors. Let me rephrase:

Are jails a cost-effective way of separating people from society, even if we only look at solutions that are at least as humane as prison?

I'm sort of jumping around the main issue, which is that I don't think prisons only exist to separate people from society and I don't think most people think about them that way, not really. I think Camus up-thread is just wrong, prisons are about more than isolation. People think about prisons in terms of punishment/justice, and deterrence, and about organization/holding during trials, and yes, people also think about prisons as a rehabilitation effort.

If you look at prisons only through the lens of "this is where we put people we don't want to be around", then the system kind of stops making sense. It's not optimized for that.

I mean, if nothing else, you really have to grapple with the fact that most people don't get life sentences. If the person being discussed in this thread gets arrested and given 4 months in jail and then comes out back into the same community, then the public housing solution only really needs to keep him off the street for 5 months in order for it to be a cheaper and more effective solution -- unless prison is serving some other set of goals beyond just separating people from society temporarily, unless it's also trying to keep people outside of prison from committing crime, through both deterrence and rehabilitation.

But if you're just worried about removing people from society, prison is an awful way of doing that for low-level offenses; it's both incredibly stressful and cruel for the person being imprisoned, and incredibly expensive, and doesn't actually keep them separated from society for more than a few months to a year.