From: matt@smoke.brl.mil (Matthew Rosenblatt)
Newsgroups: misc.legal
Subject: Re: why so much to imprison someone?
Summary: Let's reduce the cost of imprisonment to Zero -- or less.
Keywords: XIIIth Amendment
Date: 5 Nov 92 20:37:48 GMT
Organization: U.S. Army Ballistic Research Lab, APG MD.

In article <1992Nov5.040320.13895@midway.uchicago.edu> 
thf2@midway.uchicago.edu writes:

>In article <14250014@hpmwmat.sr.hp.com> mikep@hpmwtd.sr.hp.com 
>(Mike Powell) writes:

>>	I'm beginning to think in terms of "compressed sentences" in
>>	prison terms...  not "shortened"... but "compressed".
>>
>>	Serve the full term in less time....
>>
>>	At .25 the current cost.   [Mike Powell]

That's not low enough.  We ought to strive to reduce the net cost 
to Zero.

>>	Make prisons half their normal size (or double occupancy) to
>>	get twice the utility of the facility.  Remove most or all
>>	of the bennies... no tv, phone, rec. center, weight room, etc.
>>	Half the current time out of the cell, half the space to move
>>	around in...  cut all services in half...

Not only is the cost still not low enough, we run into Constitutional
problems, as Mr. Frank points out:

>Alas, there's the nasty interference of the Eighth Amendment getting
>in the way of both of our plans...   [Ted Frank]

The XIIIth Amendment explicitly permits slavery "as punishment
for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted."  A
recent column in the _Washington Afro-American_ newspaper told of
how the Federal prison system has set up an outfit (its name ends
in "-COR") to sell the products of convict labor on the open market.
That's one way to make use of the XIIIth Amendment to reduce the 
net cost of imprisoning convicted crooks.

An even better way would be to sentence a convicted criminal to 
be sold as a slave to a private corporation for a term of years.  
(Naturally, the corporation's treatment of the convict would have 
to conform to VIIIth Amendment standards.)  Not only would this 
cost the taxpayers Zero, but whatever the private corporation paid 
the government in return for the right to the convict's labor for 
the specified term of years would come as Profit to the taxpayers.
It could go to reduce the deficit!

Moreover, it stands to reason that the longer the term of service
the purchaser is getting, the more money he will be willing to pay
for it.  I have long advocated imprisoning violent first offenders
for at least thirty years to protect the public, because a violent
offender has proven by his actions that he cannot or will not restrain 
his impulses to do violence to others.  One might think that only
bleeding-heart, knee-jerk, fuzzy-minded liberals would object to
doing this, but even fellow conservatives have responded, "How are
we going to pay to keep them in prison for so many years?"  Using
the XIIIth Amendment to sell convicted violent criminals into slavery
for thirty years provides an answer to this objection:  The longer
we keep the violent criminal out of circulation, the more profit
we'll make from his purchaser.

					-- Matt Rosenblatt
                                        (matt@amsaa.brl.mil)

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