At $75K, housing a prisoner in California now costs more than a year at Harvard
I think it's worth thinking about the history of incarceration, for context.<p>Until fairly recently, prison wasn't really the way most punishments worked. They did hangings, beatings, shaming, banishment...<p>Imprisoning people long term is expensive, and kings probably couldn'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 "hard labour" 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'd rehabilitate (reform) people.<p>I think it's debatable, after generations of experience, that prisons make people more criminal. At the very least, rehabilitation doesn't work very well.<p>We'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/lawyers), we can do something more useful.<p>Prison startup?