[anonporridge]

Like all high morality, more advanced rehabilitation methods and/or more pleasant segregation of criminals from law abiding members of society, is a privilege of wealth. The richer we collectively are, the more resources we can devote to managing counterproductive individuals more humanely.

The poorer we are, the more likely we have to resort to more barbaric methods of order maintenance, like execution.

Therefore, if you have a desire for a society that doesn't imprison people (or effectively psyops them into believing they're free when they're not), your primary obligation should be towards growing civilizational real wealth.

edit; wealth is not just resource wealth as the US has in abundance, but also cultural wealth, like raising children that know how to solve their problems with words instead of violence and put their shopping cart back despite any reward or punishment.

[wongarsu]

The US has the 8th highest GPD per capita in the world (PPP, place 7 if you use nominal numbers). About the same as Denmark, yet the US has nearly ten times as many prisoners per capita.

Clearly there are more differences between Denmark and the US. But I don't think that only countries wealthier than the US (the likes of Quatar, the UAE or Luxembourg) can afford to handle crime in a more humane way.

[w______roy]

And this illustrates why GDP is a terrible metric for measuring the kind of collective/civilizational wealth that they are talking about.

[kelseyfrog]

Not untrue, but it's important to also point out the prison labor system as an economic factor that incentivizes maintaining or expanding itself. Independent from our collective riches, if the marginal return on leveraging prison labor is greater than that of non-prison labor, then the finance argument makes itself.

The reason that it's important to point this out, is that prison labor is an element of growing civilizational real wealth and this nuance is important.

[wongarsu]

At the same time, a criminal system that doesn't try to rehabilitate and reintegrate deprives society of skilled workers, at best delegating them to slave labor in the prison system. It gets even worse if you add unpaid work that prisoners would perform if they weren't imprisoned, like raising their children.

I suspect on a societal level the US justice system costs more than a system without prison labor and a focus on rehabilitation (Sweden gets mentioned frequently, but most of Western Europe qualifies). The US system self-perpetuates because of the profit it brings individuals, not because it's beneficial to society.

[jkubicek]

Alternately: The more resources we can devote to managing counterproductive individuals more humanely, the richer we collectively become.

[anonporridge]

Only if those resources give a return on investment.

If managed counter productive individuals remain a perpetual parasitic cost on society, then it's not obvious that just executing them and being done with it isn't the greatest wealth generative action.

[henryreynolds]

Great summary! While I couldn't agree more about your abstract claim, I don't think it fits the specifics of this case.

The US GDP Per Capita for 2022 was $76,399. For Norway, $106,149. That's a significant difference, but we'd need to compare a far larger set of nations to determine correlation.

I suspect that there are thresholds of wealth where restorative justice becomes more or less viable. In an isolated and preindustrial village of 100 people, confining or killing a problematic citizen may prove more costly if they provide an essential service. For post-industrial societies, there's likely a cliff after which restorative justice is consistently less costly. IIRC, Norway spends far less per capita on criminal justice than the US.

Actually, should that be my next article? Analyzing the trends of wealth, criminality, and incarceration?

[andyjohnson0]

The US already has more than enough wealth - but it needs to deploy it more responsibly. "Wealth first, morality later" is at best a lazy abdication of moral responsibility, and at worst a deliberate misdirection to maintain the personal advantage of a small part of US society.

[Ajedi32]

I agree with what you said in regards to the higher cost of lax punishments to crime, but:

> Like all high morality

Is wrong. Being poor might make it harder to avoid certain moral failings (e.g. if you're literally starving you might be forced to beak all sorts of moral principles to avoid death), but certainly not all. Not cheating on your spouse isn't a "privilege of wealth", nor is not abusing your children, and a huge number of other morals. And even in those moral situations where wealth is a factor (at least in that its correlated with "high morals") its certainly not the only one, and I think reducing things to an income level is likely to be detrimental to your desired outcomes. (Not saying you were doing that, this is just a word of caution.)

[giantg2]

"The richer we collectively are, the more resources we can devote to managing counterproductive individuals more humanely."

Just because richer societies can devote more resources doesn't mean they want to, or will.

[breather]

Really makes you wonder why courts don't push for poverty reduction in the name of crime reduction.

[zabzonk]

or higher taxes on the rich?

[anonporridge]

The combined total net worth of all US billionaires would pay for about 8 months of US federal spending...once.

Also, wealth isn't just in the form of money.

A culture that produces few criminals is a form of wealth that can't be captured by taxes.

[zabzonk]

i said "rich", not "billionaires". agree on your other points though.

[jquery]

A infinitesimal fraction of the population could pay for our entire government for 8 whole months? Sign me up. You could even leave every one of them with a billion dollars and still not change the math.

[Someone]

Yes, clearly, the US prison system is the way it is is because of lack of wealth /s

[anonporridge]

The US prison system is the way it is because we have a lot of culture poverty, despite a lot of resource wealth.

[nobody9999]

>The US prison system is the way it is because we have a lot of culture poverty, despite a lot of resource wealth.

First off, there is no single "US prison system." There are 50+ distinct prison systems in the US (one for each state/territory, plus a federal prison system) as well as hundreds of "jail" systems which are distinct from (and run by different folks) the prison systems. And that doesn't take into account the private prisons or the immigration detention facilities.

Secondly, there's wide variety in how these disparate systems are run, funded and used. As such, it's not really useful to talk about the "US prison system" as a monolithic institution.

However, one current runs through most prison systems in the US -- cruelty and a lack of interest in rehabilitation.

What's more, those who have been incarcerated are generally discriminated against (lack of access to jobs, housing and reintegration back into their communities) by society once they've served their time.

And that's the biggest cruelty of US society against those who have been imprisoned. And it negatively affects the economic potential of those folks, as well as the economic well-being of their communities. Which may lead to recidivism.

By focusing on rehabilitation and not continuing to punish those who have been incarcerated after their release by discriminating against them in a whole host of ways.

That's not to say there aren't folks who are too dangerous to be allowed to live in society. There certainly are. But those are a tiny fraction of those who pass through the various carceral systems in the US.

We're doing it wrong and have been for a long time. We can, and should, do better.

Edit: Fixed prose.