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Mar 19, 2023Liked by Philosophy bear

"It may also have political economic effects- e.g. creating families and communities invested in incarceration."

Under this category is a joint consideration: economic ouput generated by employing guards, etc, and opportunity costs generated because those people are not employed elsewhere (on the presumption that additional units of output in the productive economy is more valuable than additional labour for incarceration.

The political economic effects that you refer to here are also complicated by often being geographical in nature: some prisons provide the basis of a local economy. But prisons also drive land values down and can lock-in underdevelopment.

There's also the question of prison labour performed by prisoners, which is an exceptionally cheap source of labour for some firms.

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Mar 19, 2023Liked by Philosophy bear

> Three strikes and your out

Typo, should be "you're".

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The cost-benefit analysis of prisons should be rethought on the cost-benefit of creating an environment that deprecates people before they commit the crime. If someone is deprived of a proper livelihood, if he is deprived of a safe living environment, and if he is blamed for criminality before he commits a criminal act, do any of the actors that led him to become "criminal" bear any of the responsibility? Would there be less crime if justice focused on the actors who create the environment in which the crime occurs were themselves held criminally liable, thus removing the few who create that environment by imprisoning those actors as a method of reducing other actors from needing to commit crime? I have always wondered if crime against property would be less if property were more equitably distributed, and if crimes against people are not often emulations of those feeling removed from a proper respect. or a perception they are not properly respected. I am just uncertain if the man who makes a fortune or lives in a mansion is not being criminal by taking both property and value for himself that excludes others and I wonder how many crimes are committed because of that exclusion. But any cost-analysis of prisons and those who are forced to reside within them should not exclude external factors that make crime nearly inevitable. Once again, it seems you begin to allude to such an understanding without developing that understanding.

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