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Jaybeee -> Putting prisoners of both genders to work (12/21/2010 2:48:27 AM)
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I'd like some suggestions about what kinds of work we could allocate to prisoners, and whether we should make the burden lighter for female prisoners.
It occurs to me that, when we imprison a man (or woman), society suffers twice; once from the original crime committed, and again from the financial cost of processing him/her through the judicary and then housing them as inmates.
Now, while we can't quantify the monetary value that society has lost as the result of a murdered man, a raped woman etc, we CAN put a price on the cost of the prison system. It's simply the total amount that a government spends on it per year, divided by the number of man-days (this will include female inmates, who btw per person cost us even more), and voila, for every day spent in prison, that's what each inmate owes the rest of us.
While I recognise that most of thes bastards are largely incapable of self-managing structured, supervised work, I am disgusted by the fact that they can laze around for most of the day while the rest of us put in gruelling 40/50+hr workweeks paying for their incarceration. So what I propose is that we turn prisons into what corporate accounting refers to as "cost-centres", inmates effectively mirror outside society by performing supervised, randomly-inspected sweatshop-level work, for profit, for a few hours a day. Effectively we would be insourcing, back into the West, the repetitive, menial work that has given China/Vietnam such tremendous economic advantage. One example I'm thinking of is stuffing toys (that are then taken to a local factory for machine-stiching) and sold at at competitive rates to toy manufacturers, and given free to orphanages, but I'm sure you people have far more profitable ideas.
Slackers who don't hit productivity targets will be penalised not with beatings or withdrawal of food, but priveleges such as library/tv-room access are withdrawn until such time as the laggard has made good his backlog. If he stops working altogether, he can just sit in isolation, and I mean sensory isolation too, no books, no visits from the prison psychologist, minimal light, minimal heat, no flavouring of any kind in his food etc. Just a security monitor high in his cell.
And then I ran into a dilemma; normal government jobs that require heavy lifting (ie firefighting) MUST be open to women too, but could we legally set productivity targets as high for female inmates for a job like pumping air into a football?
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