Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Quarrelsome 42 days ago
We see this in UK prisons too, because the pay is so low, the work is dangerous and conditions are kinda shit there's now an increasing amount of hybristophiliacs (people attracted to criminals) being found within the service, who start up romantic relationships with prisoners and corrupt the service. It's harder to weed these people out when you're desperate for staff.

The solution is to pay these positions well enough to attract people who genuinely believe in the profession. But society optimises away from doing that because there's no obvious ROI outside of making running costs cheaper.

1 comments

Great, and I do agree, we know who to pay more (and who less), but how do we get there democratically? Should we vote for the party that says "we support LGBT and an infinite influx of cheap labor" or the "we support the military and the free market" party?
I think its one of those ones where we don't fix it because the market conditions of democracy can never justify spending that money in terms of prisons and most families of people who need care see limited value in spending more for an experience they don't receive. Improved spending in prisons only works in nordic societies because of laws that would never pass elsewhere, mostly allowing ex-convicts to not disclose their past (with some exemptions for sensitive jobs). You need that because the ROI in spending more on prisons is rehabilitation into society (which saves you the money on re-offending), but most other societies don't accept that and the maths is long term.

So we'll get the robots instead and the cries in response to the horrors of malfunction, will not be heard because the victims are politically weak. I only hope we never do this in education.