Out of interest, how much would you pay to avoid a 1 in 68 chance of being murdered? And how much would you pay to avoid spending a year in prison?Philosophy bear is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
I found it unclear what this line means. It seems too large a number to mean "a factor of 68,000", but the usage of the word "rate" implies that it's not "68,000 extra people went to prison".
Reading below, it appears that this is the absolute number of additional people sent to prison. In that case it's misleading to call it a "rate", since it's not one. Even if you clarify that this is a number of people, that seems like a rather useless and potentially-misleading metric, since most readers probably have no idea what the overall population of the country is and we have no way to put that number in context. The per capita number is much more important.
The average salvadorean is 27 years old, and the life expectancy is 71. So we can conservatively estimate the life lost from a murder as 44 years. For this to be off by a factor of five, a year in prison needs to be at most .13 QALY. Do you believe that?
A big thing missing from this calculus is the potential long-term benefits. My naive assumption is that over the decades, prison populations will reduce because people are now much less likely to join gangs. This positive benefit does need to be balanced with the long-term risks of having authoritarian norms.
To steelman the argument a bit, I think El Salvador demonstrates that mass incarceration achieves its goals (lower crime, less murder), not that this particular instance passes a cost benefit analysis in terms of collateral damage (innocent people swept up in the crackdown) or harm done to actual criminals (which I think most people care about a lot less than you do, especially advocates of mass incarceration).
For both those harms, I think you could make a strong case that they would be substantially less in a European or Anglo context, as our criminal justice systems are more robust to jailing innocents and our prisons are more humane (emphasis on more; many prisoners in the US especially are kept in abhorrent conditions).
I don't think it's fair to only consider moral costs in one direction. Like sure there is a cost associated with the fear of being falsely accused, but so there is for the fear of being murdered.
When evaluating the narrow costs as you defined it I think it is best to just compare murder QALYs to prison QALYs and assume family effects etc. scale proportionally
> The incarceration rate jumped by 68,000.
I found it unclear what this line means. It seems too large a number to mean "a factor of 68,000", but the usage of the word "rate" implies that it's not "68,000 extra people went to prison".
Reading below, it appears that this is the absolute number of additional people sent to prison. In that case it's misleading to call it a "rate", since it's not one. Even if you clarify that this is a number of people, that seems like a rather useless and potentially-misleading metric, since most readers probably have no idea what the overall population of the country is and we have no way to put that number in context. The per capita number is much more important.
The average salvadorean is 27 years old, and the life expectancy is 71. So we can conservatively estimate the life lost from a murder as 44 years. For this to be off by a factor of five, a year in prison needs to be at most .13 QALY. Do you believe that?
A big thing missing from this calculus is the potential long-term benefits. My naive assumption is that over the decades, prison populations will reduce because people are now much less likely to join gangs. This positive benefit does need to be balanced with the long-term risks of having authoritarian norms.
To steelman the argument a bit, I think El Salvador demonstrates that mass incarceration achieves its goals (lower crime, less murder), not that this particular instance passes a cost benefit analysis in terms of collateral damage (innocent people swept up in the crackdown) or harm done to actual criminals (which I think most people care about a lot less than you do, especially advocates of mass incarceration).
For both those harms, I think you could make a strong case that they would be substantially less in a European or Anglo context, as our criminal justice systems are more robust to jailing innocents and our prisons are more humane (emphasis on more; many prisoners in the US especially are kept in abhorrent conditions).
I don't think it's fair to only consider moral costs in one direction. Like sure there is a cost associated with the fear of being falsely accused, but so there is for the fear of being murdered.
When evaluating the narrow costs as you defined it I think it is best to just compare murder QALYs to prison QALYs and assume family effects etc. scale proportionally