[energywut]

Putting poor, desperate people in jail isn't going to solve the systemic issues that create poor, desperate people.

Locking up people for petty theft is almost certainly FAR more expensive than the cost of the materials being stolen. It costs tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars to house an inmate every year, to say nothing of the damage it causes that inmate. Prisons make criminals more likely to commit crime in the future.

A person would have to be stealing like 40 bottles of mouthwash every single day for it to be cheaper to jail an inmate rather than just replace the mouthwash for the business. Cases like that also clog the justice system and prevent solving more serious crimes, deplete shared resources like police and public defenders, and overcrowd prisons.

Even if you aren't a prison abolitionist like me, surely the rational approach here isn't "Pay more and increase the likelyhood the petty criminal becomes a serious criminal". It just makes zero rational sense to try and solve the issue that way.

[rahimnathwani]

  Prisons make criminals more likely to commit crime in the future.

Prisons make people less likely to become criminals.

Your comment focuses on prison and the impact it has on a single criminal who is caught, convicted, and put in prison. Sometimes this is a useful way to look at things.

I think it's far more useful to consider prison's impact on all the people who are not in prison. It serves as a crime deterrent.

[energywut]

> Prisons make people less likely to become criminals.

Here is a study supporting the assertion that prisons increase (or do not reduce) the likelihood of someone reoffending in the future. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/715100

Your claim that prisons reduce the likelihood of the population at large is not obvious on its face, as the US has very high rate of incarceration, but still has moderately high crime rates. Can you supply some data?

[BeFlatXIII]

> Locking up people for petty theft is almost certainly FAR more expensive than the cost of the materials being stolen

Who pays matters.

[energywut]

We pay. We pay to house inmates. It costs us a TON of money to house prison populations.

[3eb7988a1663]

This article claims that the inmate costs per state range from $23k/year (Arkansas) to $307k/year (Massachusetts).

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cost-per-prisoner-in-us-sta...