$1,524.76/day/person. Makes you wonder where the money went. Obviously paying the guard salaries and whatnot adds up, but that's luxury midtown Manhattan hotel room prices for every single inmate. It would be cheaper to hire three people for every single inmate to personally stay with them in 8 hour shifts to make sure they don't get into trouble.
Makes me wonder if it would be reasonable to pay the prisoners that much to be normal healthy members of society.
I know I'd be on my goodie two shoes if I was getting paid $550k a year. Makes me feel like the people who sabotaged my career are just trying to murder me.
This is why we need a push for radical transparency when it comes to public spending.
What did they spend $556,539 per inmate on, exactly?
Taxpayers deserve an itemized receipt.
Otherwise, by accepting overspending as the norm, it obfuscates corruption & large-scale grift as taxpayers get fleeced.
There's also substantial opportunity cost - that's $500K+ that could be going toward education or useful public services, that ended up in someone's pockets instead.
Something is off about that number. They have a population of 10,000 and an operating budget of 1.3 billion. It can't cost them half a million per inmate.
Interesting. That’s pretty high but I guess not surprising. It’s sort of like paying cost of a hotel room and meals and also prison staff. On the other hand, it’s not that much more than what cities like SF or Seattle spend on each homeless person that their programs cover.
Unrelated, and I am asking this seriously: isn’t outsourcing imprisonment how the present nation of Australia (excluding indigenous people) got populated?
It seems perhaps that the liberal democracy approach to immigration policies is now dangerous to the survival of democratic institutions. Maybe all countries should deport illegal immigrants, and severely limit immigration for a period of time by only allowing immigration for study or work. Asylum immigrations shouldn’t be allowed at all.
I sincerely hope you're never in a situation where you have to flee your country of citizenship, but if you are, you'll know then how cruel this sentiment is.
The ease and availability of asylum immigration has ruined the culture of many countries worldwide. People used to die fighting for the value system they wanted to create in their country, and now they just flee, and the end result is that many countries have turned into despotic and corrupt regimes. Meanwhile, those who gain asylum are often indoctrinated by agendas which make them resentful of the very countries protecting them. I understand the fear impulse, and the need to protect yourself and your loved ones. But I also know I am not someone who would like to flee.
That said, I think cooler heads need to prevail out of all of this because it seems to me that there is a lot of effort being put into using cultural heterogeneity for destabilizing democratic societies. Democracies need to devise safeguards against such machinations, and relying simply on race or religion will not be enough.
Huh you know it's bad when even a fairly liberal place like HN is considering the root cause to be "unsustainable" immigration (used as catch-all term).
Immigration without effective and demonstrable integration does seem to be problematic.
I think the issue is more countries should recognise that different people and cultures are different and be selective as to who they want to let in. Sweden letting in Finnish PhD candidates would probably cause less issues than letting illiterate Somali gang members or whoever the current lot of prisoners are. We went through a weird phase of saying it's racist to say that.
I don't know if integration is necessarily that important. I was a Brit in the boom days of Hong Kong when the Brits ran it and mostly the Brits did their thing and the Chinese did theirs separately but it was mutually beneficial which is what counted, kinda.
The concept of integration is also a joke. 99.99% of people that grew up south of the 50th parallel north cannot and do not want to integrate to swedish society.
The same way 99.99% of swedes cannot and do not want to integrate to a southern country.
Sure, but in an era where starving to death and stealing a loaf of bread qualified for transportation. Anyone convicted of anything particularly nasty just got the death penalty. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Code
One result of which was that NSW had such a corrupt police force they needed to bring in a British cop to remove rot from the top (~30 years ago). Recently, the NSW state government is openly corrupt with no fear of oversight as their own 'independent' anti-corruption body is toothless and disinterested in clear video evidence. You can accurately consider NSW as being a few steps away from outright third world cash-for-service bureaucracy. It has become a selfish take-what-you-can culture, and a real tragedy of the commons seems to be unfolding. The government is effectively failing.
WOW!
This is off the scale.
Sweden. Sweden went from a place that was not famous for anything, some kind of mind your own business, nothing to see here country, got some snow, some logs,meatballs, and a bit of good steel, gracious and hospitable in an incomprehensable language, to ?,a stuffed solid mega profit prison system economy? and crime wave gangs?
How asleap at the switch are the Swedes anyway?
zackly how do you get from the one place to the other?
And that they are contemplating, doubling down, on the distopian planing that got them here is a societal suicide note. A fully non acountable private, international, prison system, that gets paid by automatic withdrawl from national budgets, administered by lawyers, who get to hide behind jargon, and privacy laws.
Once started, it will never end, it will be part of the dark site, abu guantonimo, network, its taint will infect every part of society, as try as you might, exporting all of your contradictions is impossible.
I hate to think that prison should be harsher but if you had to go to prison somewhere, Sweden looks to be the most comfortable place to serve your time.
Readit News
The cost of housing one criminal in a Swedish prison is $342/day.
This is like 4x the average EU cost, or something similarly crazy.
Arbitrage is trivially feasible.
> In a 2021 analysis by the New York City Comptroller, it costs the city approximately $556,539 to detain one person for one year at Rikers Island.
I know I'd be on my goodie two shoes if I was getting paid $550k a year. Makes me feel like the people who sabotaged my career are just trying to murder me.
What did they spend $556,539 per inmate on, exactly?
Taxpayers deserve an itemized receipt.
Otherwise, by accepting overspending as the norm, it obfuscates corruption & large-scale grift as taxpayers get fleeced.
There's also substantial opportunity cost - that's $500K+ that could be going toward education or useful public services, that ended up in someone's pockets instead.
Transparency invites accountability.
Unrelated, and I am asking this seriously: isn’t outsourcing imprisonment how the present nation of Australia (excluding indigenous people) got populated?
This is why Sweden doesn't really love Denmark as much as we used to. (Yes, it's more complex, but this is one aspect.)
Before that, you screwed us when we merged our two national postal services into a single company, PostNord. You know what you did.
That said, I think cooler heads need to prevail out of all of this because it seems to me that there is a lot of effort being put into using cultural heterogeneity for destabilizing democratic societies. Democracies need to devise safeguards against such machinations, and relying simply on race or religion will not be enough.
Immigration without effective and demonstrable integration does seem to be problematic.
I don't know if integration is necessarily that important. I was a Brit in the boom days of Hong Kong when the Brits ran it and mostly the Brits did their thing and the Chinese did theirs separately but it was mutually beneficial which is what counted, kinda.
The same way 99.99% of swedes cannot and do not want to integrate to a southern country.
I hate to say it, but, the ice started melting in Antarctica. /s