NYC jails want to ban physical mail, then privatize scanning of digital versions
I feel like the prison system is the victim of perverse incentives.<p>The goal given to them is &quot;house this person securely for a specific length of time <i>at the lowest cost possible</i>&quot;. They are rewarded for cutting costs.<p>But the total cost <i>we</i> pay is the cost to imprison this person the second and third time when they re-offend. It&#x27;s the policing costs when they&#x27;re homeless because they can&#x27;t find housing or get a job. It&#x27;s the health care costs they can never pay for when all of the above inevitably leads to further problems.<p>To reduce the lifetime cost of this person on society (financially and otherwise) we should be incentivising prisons to actually rehabilitate.<p>But we won&#x27;t, because our society is largely based on Calvinist nonsense that says there are &quot;bad people&quot; and we should celebrate those people having bad things happen to them.