> Highly doubt it's an accident. The cruelty is the point:
Someone murders another, pleads down to manslaughter. Will spend 4 years in prison... but the cruelty is that after he gets out if somehow he manages to come up with money that the court system can even become aware of, we might make him pay for some of the $250,000 cost of keeping him in the cell?
Or do you just mean the people who were wrongly held before evidence exonerated them? It's not cruelty there either, just revenue collection. Someone's gotta pay for it, and when the people who should be paying get to duck out because their only income is cash from street drug sales or fenced shoplifted goods and impossible to recover, I guess those people who can hold a job that direct deposits into a bank account are on the hook.
God, I'm glad you don't review my code. Full of bugs because I'm in a hurry, don't understand the problem clearly enough, or the specifications were bad... "that's no accident, you're being cruel to the shareholders".
So, somebody who is locked up because they rejected a cop's advances, and then had evidence planted on them in retribution, should absolutely, 100% foot the bill for their time in jail, even if its eventually found that the only reason they are there is because of the laws the cop broke?
Even if I concede that literal criminals should have to pay for their accommodations (which I don't), there should be a straightforward path to appeal those costs if found not guilty. If the fees are meant to be further deterrence, then it is absolutely vital that we only deter those found guilty. Otherwise, we are depriving people of life, liberty, or property for "driving while black" or "being poor in front of your betters".
>... and when the people who should be paying get to duck out because ...
See here you're confused. You built the cage, you hired the staff to watch the cage, you are by proxy forcibly caging people in it who ought not be there, YOU pay for the damned cage! When selling coke gets you a box simply because a plurality of nitwit voters think someone selling coke should get the box, it's not about morality anymore and it's just a war... err a case of "you pay me to go beat him up because you think he stinky, but hey I found that burglar last week and stopped Russia last month so it's tots cool! *peace sign*"
Well said. Society has decided that imprisoning people is how we deal out justice, so society should have to foot the bill for that mode of justice. If society thinks that a particular crime's sentence should have a monetary component, it should make that explicitly part of the sentence, not "LOL, you go to prison AND by the way, you pay for it!"
If my house catches on fire, I don't have to pay the fire department to come out and fight the fire. Society decided that a functioning fire department is a good thing to have, and pays for it with public money.
>When selling coke gets you a box simply because a plurality of nitwit voters think
I would legalize cocaine tomorrow were I in charge. I'd regulate the pharmaceutical companies such that profits were capped at about 2% over cost, they couldn't market it, and it would be sold in a plain retail box out of liquor stores in marked, known dosages and potency. I'd do the same for heroin and meth. But every time I mention something like this, the leftist I'm arguing with backpedals instantly "oh noes, we can't do that, drugs are bad mmmkay!".
To me, this means you're clearly talking about or to someone else. Your criticisms fall from me like raindrops off a freshly waxed car.
You would do better to use rationality more than empathy, but I'm content to let you learn that lesson painfully.
> It's not cruelty there either, just revenue collection. Someone's gotta pay for it
Okay, let's extend this principle to the rest of society - if the government investigates a business for labour violations, then the business should pay for the cost of investigating them. if the government investigates you for not paying taxes, you should have to pay for that, even if you are 100% innocent.
Oh look, the more baseless accusations the governments creates, the money money they collect, how convenient!
the only issue is prisons in the US are frequently for-profit enterprises, so there's an even more perverse incentive - govco imprisons people, private prison makes money from the government, then bills the incarcerated, private prison has money to lobby for law changes that make more people "criminals" that need to be incarcerated - it's basically the same thing except now there's a bunch of fat middlemen.
Someone murders another, pleads down to manslaughter. Will spend 4 years in prison... but the cruelty is that after he gets out if somehow he manages to come up with money that the court system can even become aware of, we might make him pay for some of the $250,000 cost of keeping him in the cell?
Or do you just mean the people who were wrongly held before evidence exonerated them? It's not cruelty there either, just revenue collection. Someone's gotta pay for it, and when the people who should be paying get to duck out because their only income is cash from street drug sales or fenced shoplifted goods and impossible to recover, I guess those people who can hold a job that direct deposits into a bank account are on the hook.
God, I'm glad you don't review my code. Full of bugs because I'm in a hurry, don't understand the problem clearly enough, or the specifications were bad... "that's no accident, you're being cruel to the shareholders".