Are jails a cost-effective way of separating people from society?
I see a couple of problems:
- most prison terms are limited (any prison term for petty theft is going to be).
- prisons often release people into the same communities they came out of.
- it is tremendously expensive to even get someone into prison, you have to arrest them and either get them through a trial or at least pay for sentencing if they just plead guilty.
If the entire goal of prison is to separate offenders from society (which could be its own conversation, but whatever, we'll take it for granted that's the goal), we still kind of need to ask if prison is the best way of doing that.
> Are jails a cost-effective way of separating people from society?
Optimizing for cost is not what you want. The most cost effective way of separating people from society is a summary execution with no trial. Prisons aren't meant to be the cheapest solution, they're meant to be a more humane compromise.
We optimize for cost alongside other factors. Let me rephrase:
Are jails a cost-effective way of separating people from society, even if we only look at solutions that are at least as humane as prison?
I'm sort of jumping around the main issue, which is that I don't think prisons only exist to separate people from society and I don't think most people think about them that way, not really. I think Camus up-thread is just wrong, prisons are about more than isolation. People think about prisons in terms of punishment/justice, and deterrence, and about organization/holding during trials, and yes, people also think about prisons as a rehabilitation effort.
If you look at prisons only through the lens of "this is where we put people we don't want to be around", then the system kind of stops making sense. It's not optimized for that.
I mean, if nothing else, you really have to grapple with the fact that most people don't get life sentences. If the person being discussed in this thread gets arrested and given 4 months in jail and then comes out back into the same community, then the public housing solution only really needs to keep him off the street for 5 months in order for it to be a cheaper and more effective solution -- unless prison is serving some other set of goals beyond just separating people from society temporarily, unless it's also trying to keep people outside of prison from committing crime, through both deterrence and rehabilitation.
But if you're just worried about removing people from society, prison is an awful way of doing that for low-level offenses; it's both incredibly stressful and cruel for the person being imprisoned, and incredibly expensive, and doesn't actually keep them separated from society for more than a few months to a year.
Is it? It says things like "Smith is critical of government and officialdom, but is no champion of laissez-faire" and "A further theme of The Wealth Of Nations is that competition and free exchange are under threat from the monopolies, tax preferences, controls, and other privileges that producers extract from the government authorities".
I would say that is fairly accurate.
I've noticed that when it comes to Adam Smith there's no shortage of people who try to make out he was some kind of proto-communist while smugly telling off straw man economists for cherry picking him - but it doesn't seem true to me.
The "The role of government" paragraph is more balanced (though IMO still skewed - well, I should admit that I have only skimmed WoN), but the first paragraph is really not.
(Author here) That's the Roguelike tutorial I created, not the Hands-on Rust book. The two are quite different beasts, with a bit of overlap.
Hands-on Rust is designed for the newcomer to Rust, and carefully maps tutorial sections through teaching beginner-to-intermediate Rust concepts. It starts with some basic Rust exercises, works through a Flappy Bird clone, and then uses Roguelike development to teach a lot of underlying Rust concepts. It also teaches gamedev, and tries to do so in a way you can reuse in other games.
The tutorial is all Roguelike, all the time - focused on building a working roguelike.
Does your circle of friends on FB actually go to every county, water board, school board, etc. meeting and take notes? Because that was the old role of the local paper, which could often get scoops from a reporter whose job it was to go to those.
Anything interesting that happens at a school board makes the news now because everyone there has a phone and internet. What exciting scoops do you think we're missing?
Towns where the newspaper has shut down have provably higher levels of excess spending and governmental waste & corruption:
> Cities where newspapers closed up shop saw increases in government costs as a result of the lack of scrutiny over local deals, say researchers who tracked the decline of local news outlets between 1996 and 2015.
> Disruptions in local news coverage are soon followed by higher long-term borrowing costs for cities. Costs for bonds can rise as much as 11 basis points after the closure of a local newspaper—a finding that can’t be attributed to other underlying economic conditions, the authors say. Those civic watchdogs make a difference to the bottom line.
I don't see the issue. Price of a company's stock goes up as the company continues to become more useful over time and no one thinks this is unreasonable. Why not same for a product?
And is the same model used by many 'early access' titles, pay less up front for the incomplete game to fund the completion of the future full-price game.
Interestingly, I've seen some devs turn the concept on its head and charge more up front, kind of to say "only buy in now if you are really doing this to support development, and in return you'll get an early release build - but you aren't buying the game early."
