{"id":560,"date":"2006-08-09T22:36:00","date_gmt":"2006-08-10T04:36:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/2006\/08\/09\/the-costs-of-incarcerating-those-who-neednt-be-incarcerated-2\/"},"modified":"2006-08-09T22:36:00","modified_gmt":"2006-08-10T04:36:00","slug":"the-costs-of-incarcerating-those-who-neednt-be-incarcerated-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/2006\/08\/09\/the-costs-of-incarcerating-those-who-neednt-be-incarcerated-2\/","title":{"rendered":"the costs of incarcerating those who needn&#8217;t be incarcerated"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.kare11.com\/video\/player.aspx?aid=31567&amp;bw=\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" src=\"http:\/\/photos1.blogger.com\/blogger\/6608\/1089\/200\/moyle.jpg\" border=\"0\" \/><\/a>criminologists often write about the costs of incarceration &#8211;generating crude estimates by multiplying the number of inmates by the per diem paid by the taxpayers. larger costs, of course, are borne by the inmates who don&#8217;t <em>really <\/em>need to be there.<\/p>\n<p>though i&#8217;ve written about the <a href=\"http:\/\/chrisuggen.blogspot.com\/2005\/09\/safer-in-prison-death-rates-declining.html\">relative safety<\/a> of prisons and jails, they clearly remain dangerous places to spend the night &#8212; especially for younger arrestees and those brought in on minor charges.<\/p>\n<p>carl edward moyle was booked into the sherburne county jail yesterday and was <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kare11.com\/news\/news_article.aspx?storyid=131884\">beaten to death<\/a> within twelve hours. his crime was a simple traffic offense: driving without proof of insurance, which is a gross misdemeanor in minnesota for repeat offenders. his assailant was a state prison inmate awaiting trial for assaulting yet <em>another <\/em>inmate in a st. cloud penitentiary.<\/p>\n<p>sherburne county sheriff bruce anderson, jail administrators, and minnesota corrections officials will surely be asked why they failed to segregate an inmate with a history of assaulting other inmates. but my question is more basic: do we really need to be locking up folks because they don&#8217;t have insurance? given state variation in insurance requirements, can you think of a better example of a <em>mala prohibita<\/em> offense?<\/p>\n<p>doing prison interviews, i&#8217;ve asked inmates &#8220;how many of these guys need to be here?&#8221; most respond with an estimate between 25 and 75 percent of their fellow residents, easily pointing out examples in each category. i suspect that the incarcerated could have distinguished between mr. moyle and his assailant. i know that few would identify traffic violators as deserving of incarceration, much less a fatal beating.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>criminologists often write about the costs of incarceration &#8211;generating crude estimates by multiplying the number of inmates by the per diem paid by the taxpayers. larger costs, of course, are borne by the inmates who don&#8217;t really need to be there. though i&#8217;ve written about the relative safety of prisons and jails, they clearly remain [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-560","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/560","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=560"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/560\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=560"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=560"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=560"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}