At $75K, housing a prisoner in California now costs more than a year at Harvard
I think it&#x27;s worth thinking about the history of incarceration, for context.<p>Until fairly recently, prison wasn&#x27;t really the way most punishments worked. They did hangings, beatings, shaming, banishment...<p>Imprisoning people long term is expensive, and kings probably couldn&#x27;t have afforded anything like a modern scale prison system. The closest thing was more slavery than imprisonment, and economically self-sufficient or better. Anything from the indentured servant transports to the Americas to &quot;hard labour&quot; in a gravel mine or somesuch. Cannon fodder, sometimes.<p>The way we got to here was largely moral reasoning. Those punishments are cruel and inhumane. Early versions of modern prison systems were often created with the idea they&#x27;d rehabilitate (reform) people.<p>I think it&#x27;s debatable, after generations of experience, that prisons make people more criminal. At the very least, rehabilitation doesn&#x27;t work very well.<p>We&#x27;re stuck with different ideas of what prisons are even for? Rehabilitation sounds societally useful, but the failures have been overwhelming. Justice? Deterrence?<p>Surely, with that sort of budget (not including courts&#x2F;lawyers), we can do something more useful.<p>Prison startup?