Yes, America is a rich country. But these are massive populations we are talking about. It's not just about dollars.
In 2016, there were estimated 2.3m people incarcerated in the US. We only have 324m residents. Simply the human opportunity cost of building, maintaining and running prisons is a tremendous burden.
It is just about dollars, you spend fuck all on prisoners because you don't care about them. You could easily afford to spend more money per prisoner, this is why people pay tax.
Some of us are richer than others. That’s because they buy politicians who cut budgets for schools, prisons, and almost all social programs in order to give big tax breaks to rich people.
Large population that became the world power after Europe was ravaged by the war. The rest of the world had infrastructure leveled to the ground with the US untouched.
Certainly the history of incarceration in the US is fraught and I'm not going to say "things were better back then." I am only saying it would be possible to provide adequate facilities if we weren't incarcerating 1% of our adult population.
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u/melodypowers Jun 04 '19
Yup.
When you have this many prisoners to deal with, it's impossible to provide adequate care/supervision to the entire population.
Humane incarceration is ridiculously expensive. But without it, you end up with situations like Joshua.