
Upgrade your jail cell for a price - lisper
http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-pay-to-stay-jails/
======
aub3bhat
Having seen the horrific rikers beating video. [1] I don't understand why in
this day and age, prisons are NOT under 100% CCTV monitoring. Is this just out
of sight, out of mind approach? As we debate body-worn cameras to prevent
police brutality, ensuring prison and jails are kept under constant
surveillance might help reduce recidivism.

It's also tragic that there is direct equivalence to the charter/public school
debate. A lot of the arguments for/against charters schools can be simply
applied by swapping school for prison. And just like test-scores/teaching-
philosophy, you have a superior scandinavian approach.

[1]
[https://www.nytimes.com/video/nyregion/100000002996576/foota...](https://www.nytimes.com/video/nyregion/100000002996576/footage-
of-inmate-beating-at-rikers.html)

~~~
leesalminen
I agree. I know someone who was arrested for being drunk in public (very, very
drunk and belligerent). Once at the jail I guess she continued being
belligerent.

At this point she was restrained on a gurney, surrounded by no less than 4
guards. She said something rude and as a result was tazed not once but 3
times.

After I bailed her out we went to the sherrifs office and requested an
investigation. After a few days they claimed to not be able to find any video
of this happening. They conceded that there are multiple areas where the
cameras can't see.

I also found out that the guards at the jail are not sheriff deputies, but
employed by a private corporation. But they wear the same uniform as the
deputies, sans badge.

The criminal justice system in this country is disgusting. Truly disgusting.
If I'm ever fortunate enough to be financially secure (long term) I plan to
dedicate my time to induce change in this area of our society.

One interest effect this had on me was respect for local law enforcement. I
used to have some level of respect for them and what I had observed as
professionalism. That's all out the window now, and I have 0 respect for them.
Instead of being polite and reasonable I am now combative and uncooperative in
any encounter. They can taser me all they want, Ill just use it as a public
campaign against them.

~~~
ythn
What the guards did was wrong, but don't you think your belligerent drunk
friend needs to share even a tiny bit of the blame? People act like civilians
should be able to do or say literally anything and fully expect law
enforcement to be perfectly rational and fair and gentle with them.

~~~
aqme28
I 100% believe that "civilians should be able to do or say literally anything
and fully expect law enforcement to be perfectly rational and fair and gentle
with them."

And I don't see why that's not feasible.

~~~
ythn
> And I don't see why that's not feasible.

Because law enforcement is made up of the same imperfect, mistake making
humans as the bone-headed civilians that committed the offense.

~~~
tdb7893
The thing is that they have less expectations than civilians in many cases. If
someone was restrained and I tazed them three times I would be arrested
immediately.

------
sevensor
When I read this in Snow Crash, I thought Neal Stephenson was being
deliberately absurd. But here we are. Want to go to The Hoosegow LLC and not
The Clink, Incorporated? That'll be an extra $50 a night.

~~~
logfromblammo
I didn't even bat an eye. This was probably because this is completely
sensible and logical in a libertarian/anarchist society. The concept is
expanded in other works of dystopic fiction.

You pay for the best jail you can afford. If you are found innocent, your
accuser/prosecutor has to reimburse your costs. If you are found guilty, you
have to pay restitution to your victims (or their still-living
representatives), and the justice service provider handling your case will
take whatever measures may be appropriate to protect their subscribers from
you after your release. If you can't immediately make restitution, there may
be a supervised work program around that will help you finance your jail
boarding and court judgments. Or maybe the judge will work out a deal to
reduce your weregeld bill, perhaps in exchange for something like submitting
to a specific torture, or having a warning tattooed across your forehead.

If you're a really hard case, you just get named outlaw, and someone kills you
for the bounty.

For most people, instead of paying taxes to a county, you would pay a
subscription fee to a company that provides all-in-one security, dispute
resolution, arbitration, rehabilitation, and property and casualty insurance.
You might pay $99/month to a reseller agent of Brinks Allstate, and your
neighbor might pay $119/month directly to Alfa Pinkertons through their
website. If your kid's bike gets stolen, the cop-adjuster comes by to take
your report, helps you file your claim, and determines whether it would be
cost effective to investigate and prosecute. If they do, and it turns out your
neighbor's cousin was operating a bike theft ring out of their garage, the
Alfa Pinkertons arrest him, put him in their jail, and provide him with
defense counsel. Brinks Allstate and Alfa Pinkerton have a pre-existing
extradition agreement in place, engage Wopner-Brown-Scheindlin as their
arbitration subcontractor, who in turn sub-subcontracts some jurors from
YourPeers. (You might also need to have a separate justice provider through
your workplace.)

After the neighbor is found guilty, he has to pay back the cost of reimbursing
the bike owners. Perhaps a few of them are willing to buy their stolen bikes
back with [a portion of] their insurance money. Until his checks clear, he
stays in the Alfa Pinkerton jail's sweatshop, working off that debt at
$X/hour. After he's out, he goes right back to being that creepy guy living
above your neighbor's garage, and his credit score goes back up with that
"RESTITUTION PAID IN FULL" line on his report.

As bad as this all sounds, our actual, real-life criminal control system is in
some ways worse.

~~~
twoquestions
That's a _lot_ of people that have to work together when they don't have to
and have no incentive to in order for this to be even somewhat effective.

Part of me wants to be a libertarian/anarchist, but the way their ideas
resemble freshman physics explanations that ignore friction and wind
resistance really turns me off.

~~~
logfromblammo
The incentive for everyone is in not getting murdered, pillaged, or otherwise
brutalized by roving bands of outlaw raiders, like in Mad Max or Fallout.
Also, the whole thing runs on pure, unadulterated money-grubbing.

A libertarian world really is a nightmare for the people who believe that the
government world does not essentially do exactly the same thing, but with
better PR, and maybe different price points. The government version of
freshman physics assumes a spherical cow. The libertarian version assumes a
spherical pig. The Internet argues about the flavor of the milk.

The truth is that no one will admit there may be warts on their favorite
goblin baby until they are growing one right on the end of their pointy little
green nose. I have already spent an awful lot of time on the Internet arguing
both for and against libertarian ideas. The only good thing that can really be
said about the adherents of alternate political views is that at least they
recognize that change is only possible if you try something different. You
can't really ever predict the outcome of a system when you divorce its ideal
workings from the real people who will eventually be running it.

------
gmarx
I don't see this as especially outrageous. The part that bothers me is that it
isn't available to poorer criminals. But I don't agree with the ex-gang fellow
who said getting your ass beat is part of the punishment. That seems unfair to
weaker criminals in the same way this scheme is unfair to poor ones. I think
the state has an obligation to keep inmates physically safe. If physical
violence is something we want as an official part of the punishment let's just
bring back corporal punishment.

Also can't help but notice the problem with making this more widely available.
The violence in regular jail is a consequence of being locked up with violent
people. If you move them to these easier jails they would bring the violence
with them

~~~
leesalminen
I think exposing rich people to the same conditions as poor people in jail is
extremely important.

Monetary wealth translates to social power more often than not.

If rich people experience the same jail as poor, they will push in society to
improve it. If you let the rich opt-out they'll never see it and won't be
motivated to induce change.

I have spent a couple nights in jail. I know what it's like, and it's not
acceptable for anyone to be exposed to this. Change is needed whether you're
rich, poor, black, white or purple.

~~~
gmarx
I agree in principle but I doubt enough rich people would ever get sent to
jail to make a difference.

~~~
leesalminen
Sad, but appears to be true. I did some cursory googling and found this[0].

[0]
[https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/income.html](https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/income.html)

------
dsr_
Every argument in favor of letting people with money have a nicer prison
experience than those without is an argument in favor of fixing prison
problems for every inmate, instead.

As a side benefit, you avoid seeing rich people swinging from lampposts
instead of serving time.

~~~
Toboe
> Every argument in favor of letting people with money have a nicer prison
> experience than those without is an argument in favor of fixing prison
> problems for every inmate, instead.

Uhm, could it be that you have a typo in your posts, like a missing not?
Because i have a hard time finding logic in the argument as written.

------
logfromblammo
Cop: So would you rather go to The Hoosegow, or The Clink?

YT: Hoosegow, no question.

Cop: You know, we get a kickback from The Clink for every suspect we bring in.

YT: How much do you want?

Cop: How about a hundred? Swipe your card through the reader.

YT: Done. Enjoy your bribe.

Cop: The Clink it is.

YT: My union will hear about this.

------
moomin
This is despicable, but the conditions at the average prison are despicable
too. Just watch almost any cop show to see how the expectation of prison rape
has become normalised in American society.

~~~
boundring
Let it be known: jail is not prison.

Short-term incarceration (less than two years, and that's not an arbitrary
figure) leads to much different conditions than long-term incarceration.
There's different effects on humans and different changes in valuated needs.

Rape tends to be the province of those expecting little to no change in their
long-term experience. A little different from murder in incarceration, in that
the victim has opportunity for reprisal.

------
clock_tower
Well, it worked for pre-revolutionary France! What could possibly go wrong?

------
david-cako
Can't wait for prisons to start selling life insurance :^)

~~~
ryandrake
Morbid thought: I'm surprised there isn't a cottage industry around buying
life insurance policies on prison inmates. I bet you could use statistical
methods and/or machine learning to profitably predict inmates most likely to
die early, given the prison location, staff, the inmate's crime, and other
factors.

~~~
RubenSandwich
Not only morbid but I'd argue morally wrong as well, as this would be betting
on peoples lives. It's just as awful as the coliseum just without you being
exposed to the blood.

~~~
drjesusphd
How is this different from life insurance in general?

------
sneak
How do I disable untrusted pages reading my phone's precise 3d orientation
without my permission?

------
vfclists
Some European prisons are way better than the best America's pay fof jail
schemes.

America's jails are places where people got to get abused rather than get
rehabilitated, so what is the big deal about some people paying for a better
environment?

~~~
Someone1234
> so what is the big deal about some people paying for a better environment?

Because it incentives the private prison to make the situation even worse for
those who fail to pay. Effectively the worse they make the "free" the more
money they make.

To use an analogy, it is like Amazon Prime, when Amazon Prime first started
free shipping was at $25 minimum order. Last year free shipping was at $49.
Why? To incentivise Prime memberships. Only competition from Walmart forced
them to bring it back down to $35.

So back to prisons... If this became popular, we'd see more prisons who offer
zero privacy as the "free" option (e.g. shared bunk beds) all as a means to
"incentivise" (blackmail) prisoners into paying for a semi-private or private
room.

Plus when you take into account the safety aspect, the whole thing becomes
immoral. You're literally forcing prisoners to pay so they can sleep safely at
night, otherwise they might get shanked while they sleep (or not get any sleep
due to fear). US prisons are already much less safe than most European,
Canadian, or AUS/NZ prisons.

------
techrich
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debtors'_prison#Great_Britain_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debtors'_prison#Great_Britain_.28later_the_United_Kingdom.29)

------
belovedeagle
Despite the article's inane attempts to link this to sex crimes, I see nothing
wrong with this. Housing and feeding prisoners is a huge drain on society; a
prisoner who alleviates that drain absolutely deserves a more humane
experience. That's not to say that everyone else doesn't deserve a more humane
experience, but we simply can't afford it. No one is suggesting we close down
shelters and start housing the homeless in five star hotels, and no one seems
to be too bothered by that. On the whole I'd rather money be spent first on
that than upgrading prisons.

EDIT: As to the idea that this somehow reduces the effective punishment: while
that might be true for the ultra-rich for whom $10k is irrelevant (but since
when do they go to prison anyways?), for everyone else, having to fund your
own incarceration [directly, in addition to funding everyone else's via
taxation,] seems to offset that.

~~~
ThrustVectoring
Incentives matter. If you allow prisons to charge for improved prisoner
experience, you make the default prison experience the BATNA for negotiating
how much money you give the folks running the prison.

Like, if you pay ransoms when terrorists take Americans hostage, you're
funding kidnap-Americans-and-ransom-them businesses. If you pay prisons for
more humane treatment, you're funding imprison-people-and-threaten-them-with-
inhumane-conditions businesses.

IMO, it should be illegal for prisons to get money from prisoners. There's a
bunch of really shitty things that inevitably happen. See:
[https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/31/us/steep-costs-of-
inmate-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/31/us/steep-costs-of-inmate-phone-
calls-are-under-scrutiny.html)

------
dmitrygr
Given that current jail conditions are dismal as best, I see no reason for
private companies to not offer for-pay incarceration services that solve these
problems. This is no different than private companies offering delivery
services because USPS sucks, or private transportation companies existing
because bus infra simply isn't good enough. If a judge considers these options
prison-like enough, then I see no reason they cannot exist.

Does it suck because not everyone can afford it? Sure

Does that mean we should just screw everyone equally simply to claim we're
fair? IMHO no. Not unless you also want to close down UPS, FedEx, and
Greyhound. And not unless you are willing to come out and openly say that
_YOU_ consider rape, abuse, and neglect to be an official part of our
rehabilitation strategy (because that is all that county and federal prisons
excel at)

~~~
aaron_m04
You write as if the current jail conditions are set in stone. Why is that?

~~~
dmitrygr
You write as is USPS's suckiness is set in stone.

Alternatives are allowed even if incumbents can change...

~~~
aaron_m04
My point is that allowing alternatives for a price removes the incentive to
fix the free somution for everyone who can afford that price.

~~~
dmitrygr
In that case please stop driving (go fix public transit), eating at
restaurants (go fix soup kitchens), using Lyft (go fix cabs), etc...

(The point is: the people providing alternatives are under no obligation to
fix anything. Isn't HN all about disrupting bad models?)

~~~
eon1
You could say that YC is.. HN is just a tech news/discussion site. If anything
it's all about (comparatively) respectful discourse.

