[pcwalton]

You need lots of doctors, especially with an aging prison population. Doctors aren't cheap. Not to mention the cost of medicine, which can get very expensive when you consider things like end stage cancer drugs for elderly prisoners who can't be released because they're serving LWOP, and it all must be paid for by the state.

Or consider institution GED classes. You might say, those can easily go on the chopping block to save some money. But then you end up with inmates who are released without a high school diploma and, lacking educational opportunities, are more likely to return to crime. Then they go back into the prison system where they use more state resources than if they had just been given education in the first place. It's easy to imagine scenarios in which programs like that are worthwhile in the long term purely for fiscal reasons even if you care 0% about the welfare of criminals themselves.

[sokoloff]

Prisoners should have access to healthcare and education at a similar level as provided for the general population. Other than security-related cost increases, the government is already bearing those costs.

[Retric]

Prisons can’t cheaply leverage the normal healthcare system. Sending someone to a dentist / hospital etc requires they remain unable to escape through the entire process which inherently adds overhead. Having healthcare workers on staff creates mismatches between their workload and the size of the prison population.

[tomp]

I don’t get it. Sounds like all the things the state would offer anyways - education and healthcare for poor people…

[chefandy]

Yeah but in a prison it's more difficult to use bureaucracy and shame to stop people from utilizing those services.