Fully agreed that this incentive would also be well spent on programs directly for the prisoner. Unfortunately, there is no way that you could convince law makers to consider this. Imagine the headlines: “My Rapist Is Payed More than Me,” “Go Directly to Jail, Collect $200″, “Pennsylvania Begins New Steal to Earn Program,” “Don’t Qualify for Student Loans? Steal a Car!”
People are more comfortable if the money goes to some intermediary. I would expect prisons are the best group to insensitivize because they have the captive audience. If job training works, prisons can earn money by providing job training. If they need reasonable jobs, it would be in the prison’s interest to make ties with recruiters or hire a full time job seeker on the prisoner’s behalf.
For the record, also agreed that education and health care are great preventative expenditures but that is a different system for reforming and one with a lot of partisan lines in the sand. I think it would be disproportionately difficult to use incentives to reform those areas because facts don’t matter when partisanism starts happening.
Fully agreed that this incentive would also be well spent on programs directly for the prisoner. Unfortunately, there is no way that you could convince law makers to consider this. Imagine the headlines: “My Rapist Is Payed More than Me,” “Go Directly to Jail, Collect $200″, “Pennsylvania Begins New Steal to Earn Program,” “Don’t Qualify for Student Loans? Steal a Car!”
People are more comfortable if the money goes to some intermediary. I would expect prisons are the best group to insensitivize because they have the captive audience. If job training works, prisons can earn money by providing job training. If they need reasonable jobs, it would be in the prison’s interest to make ties with recruiters or hire a full time job seeker on the prisoner’s behalf.
For the record, also agreed that education and health care are great preventative expenditures but that is a different system for reforming and one with a lot of partisan lines in the sand. I think it would be disproportionately difficult to use incentives to reform those areas because facts don’t matter when partisanism starts happening.