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Uh, imprisonment in the US is ridiculously expensive, and that's mostly security costs which don't exactly get easier if the prisoners are doing hard labor.
Our justice system is expensive because it's poorly designed. Or rather, because it wasn't designed-- because it's just a long pile-up of compromises with no guiding ethos. And yet, despite that, if we assume we're not going to redesign it, then imprisonment is still cheaper than the death penalty. If we assume we are going to redesign it, then why no redesign it so that criminals directly repay their contributions to society?
People demand that prisons be punitive while at the same time squeamish about the exact nature of punishment. Of course that leads to poor optimization for economic efficiency. We could get a lot more efficient use out of prisoners if we were a lot more judicious about exactly which rights we chose to violate, while at the same time not losing our heads if the same measures end up making prisoners happy. For example, encouraging moderate cocaine use but then predicating their supply on being productive and compliant.
(I'm not saying that specific intervention would solve our problem, just using it as an example of the sort of measure no one is even willing to consider.)
I'm also addressing your comment here:
... with the above. Historically, slaves did plenty of complicated, specialized work that required a surprisingly high level of education. In rome,
That in the modern day compelled labour is typically done by people with only the desire for and ability to compel uncomplicated work doesn't mean we'd have to stick to that paradigm. We imprison plenty of lawyers, hedge fund managers, accountants, scientists, etcetera. It shouldn't be impossible to convince them to do work that's on net beneficial to society even if we have to pay them with cash or reductions to their sentences.
No we don’t. Rome captured some scribes as slaves, it’s pretty rare that a person commits a worthy-of-imprisonment crime while even able to work a factory job, let alone something high paying.
I'm not saying "plenty of" in terms of "proportion of the total population." I'm saying "plenty of" in terms of absolute numbers. I suspect many of those people would be happy for time off their sentences in return for working in the field they're trained for on behalf of the government.
Like, not to put too fine a point on it, but that's sort of exactly what we do with hackers already-- there's an existing pipeline from "black hat hacker" to "government spook."
And "worthy of imprisonment" crime is a measure biased towards people who commit crimes with an impact toward a few, specific individuals, rather than e.g. financial crimes that often have vastly more impact than your average armed robbery but result in far less jail time.
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