The concept of justice in this country doesn’t involve trying to make victims as whole as possible, it involves locking offenders in secure storage faculties for arbitrarily defined spans of time. Seeing justice in this way has numerous downsides. One of those downsides is that the justice system becomes expensive. Couple the expense of a storage-based justice system with a list of laws so long that no single individual can ever hope to memorize it entirely and you end up with a financial crisis:
Gov. Jerry Brown’s spending plan for the fiscal year that starts July 1 includes a record $11.4 billion for the corrections department while also predicting that there will be 11,500 fewer inmates in four years because voters in November approved earlier releases for many inmates.
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The price for each inmate has doubled since 2005, even as court orders related to overcrowding have reduced the population by about one-quarter. Salaries and benefits for prison guards and medical providers drove much of the increase.
The result is a per-inmate cost that is the nation’s highest — and $2,000 above tuition, fees, room and board, and other expenses to attend Harvard.
If California wants to spend billions of dollars for nothing of value, I can think of some alternatives that would at least have some kind of positive quality.
The only positive thing that I can say about a storage-based justice system is that it eventually bankrupts any government that implements it. Unfortunately, the bankruptcy doesn’t happen until a lot of misery has been created both in the victims because no real attempt has been made to make them whole again and the prisoners who spend years sitting in a cage doing nothing of value to anybody.