> Imprisoning someone for one year in the USA costs in the order of 100,000 dollars
There surely must be some way to decrease that by *at least* a factor of 4 or so, possibly by an order of magnitude, if we wanted to? (The poverty line for a 8-person household in the contiguous US in 2025 is $54,150.) Surely that might involve treating prisoners in rather questionable ways, but still way less questionable than f—ing killing them, IMO.
Another objection I have is that [waaay too many things are considered crimes that shouldn’t be](https://archive.org/details/threefeloniesday0000silv) -- what fraction of people in prison are there for reasons comparable to any of your examples?
> Imprisoning someone for one year in the USA costs in the order of 100,000 dollars
There surely must be some way to decrease that by *at least* a factor of 4 or so, possibly by an order of magnitude, if we wanted to? (The poverty line for a 8-person household in the contiguous US in 2025 is $54,150.) Surely that might involve treating prisoners in rather questionable ways, but still way less questionable than f—ing killing them, IMO.
Another objection I have is that [waaay too many things are considered crimes that shouldn’t be](https://archive.org/details/threefeloniesday0000silv) -- what fraction of people in prison are there for reasons comparable to any of your examples?
There are the predictable lobbies for increasing the price taxpayers pay for prisoners, but not much advocacy for decreasing it.