On one hand I hope that people, especially nonviolent people who are no threat to society at large, are able to serve their time while being able to reintegrate with society so that they have a stable job and network once their sentence is up.
On the other hand, I worry this sounds a lot like private prisons. What happens if the crime rate goes way, way down, or that the only people left in prison are the dangerous who wouldn’t qualify for Promise? What does that do to your profits? Would you be willing to accept an ultimately very low revenue in exchange for a “job well done”?
Anything that combines “for-profit” and “criminal justice system” makes me uncomfortable, even if people’s hearts are in the right places and the business does do good in the world. I hope this works out, but I am uneasy about yet another business that sees criminals as a market.
74 percent of people in county jails are waiting for a trial. Of that a majority are bail eligible, but cannot afford it. They have not been convicted of the crime they were arrested for. We are focusing on the population that would otherwise be incarcerated because they cannot afford bail.
The reason they can't make bail is because it's either set very high because the charges are very serious or they've made very poor financial decisions. Either case, they are a flight risk. It's very likely they'll bolt if let out. Your program doesn't address that.
Ok, that’s much better than relying on convicted criminals as a profit source. It’s a shame how much suffering and scapegoating people accused of a crime in this country have to go through before they even reach trial.
One very surprising thing about the US justice system is that most first time inmates do not reoffend. A person released from my state's prisons for the first time doesn't go back 80% of the time in the next 5-10 years (whatever the tracking period is).
So there's two entirely different inmate flows, the one timers, and the all the timers. If you made a magical, pre-trial system that could completely stop reoffending, you'd still have a pretty good flow from just first timers, who keep showing up as long as humans are humans.
At the same time, preventing reoffending would make prison populations drop dramatically, since most people in prison are there for violent crimes and usually repeat offenders.
On the other hand, I worry this sounds a lot like private prisons. What happens if the crime rate goes way, way down, or that the only people left in prison are the dangerous who wouldn’t qualify for Promise? What does that do to your profits? Would you be willing to accept an ultimately very low revenue in exchange for a “job well done”?
Anything that combines “for-profit” and “criminal justice system” makes me uncomfortable, even if people’s hearts are in the right places and the business does do good in the world. I hope this works out, but I am uneasy about yet another business that sees criminals as a market.