My 3 bullets for justice in prisons

• In too many countries around the world when judges sentence people to prisons, they are in fact sentencing them to another Auschwitz in terms of the absolute disrespect those places show for the most basic human rights, and worse the judges cannot even start to claim they didn’t know. When will the International Criminal Court in The Hague start to investigate these crimes against humanity?


• Justice is something very difficult to understand with precision, since it is situated along a continuum that becomes finite only when it reaches Divine Justice. On the other hand, injustices are much easier to identify and, in our countries, prisons themselves represent one of the greatest injustices. In terms of the use of scarce resources, as an economist I am convinced that programs of Judicial Reforms would be better served by improving prisons than by investing in Supreme Court buildings.


• The world needs to adhere to a minimum set of global good-prison practices and allow for ISO 9000-type quality certifications of its prisons and jails.

Justice begins with having just prisons

They are sending them to another Auschwitz.

In too many countries around the world when judges sentence people to prisons, they are in fact sentencing them to another Auschwitz in terms of the absolute disrespect those places show for the most basic human rights, and worse the judges cannot even start to claim they didn’t know. When will the International Criminal Court in The Hague start to investigate these crimes against humanity? Also, many ongoing judicial-reform processes would do well to reflect upon the fact that civilized prison systems do more for justice than majestic Supreme Court buildings.

Forget justice and fight the injustices

Justice is something very difficult to understand with precision, since it is situated along a continuum that becomes finite only when it reaches Divine Justice. On the other hand, injustices are much easier to identify and, in our countries, prisons themselves represent one of the greatest injustices. In terms of the use of scarce resources, as an economist I am convinced that programs of Judicial Reforms would be much better served by improving prisons than by investing in Supreme Courts.

We need minimum standards

The world needs to adhere to some absolutely minimum set of global good prison practices and allow all prisons to be subjected to an ISO 9000-type quality certification.

McPrison

An introduction to McPrison added in my book Voice and Noise, 2006 "Justice needs to begin with just prisons"

"Dear Friends. A couple of weeks ago I had the chance to participate in Madrid in a seminar about Judicial Reform in Latin America, and this made me publish the following article in my country, Venezuela. I wish to share it with you. I know the majestic emblems of power are important, but when I travel around in many countries and see all these new beautiful Supreme Court buildings mushrooming, and know about the horrendous, more horrendous, and most horrendous state of most of the prisons, I just feel that someone got it all upside down."

Here though is the original from 2004:

McPrison

 

Justice is something very difficult to understand with precision, since it is situated along a continuum that becomes finite only when it reaches Divine Justice. On the other hand, injustices are much easier to identify and, in our countries, prisons themselves represent one of the greatest injustices. 

In terms of the use of scarce resources, as an economist I am convinced that justice would today be much better served by improving prisons than by investing in Supreme Courts. I am not advocating, nor do I believe in, imported solutions. Moreover, if we were to respect individual rights defined as extravagantly as possible, for example, by guaranteeing in Venezuela access to justice similar to that O.J. Simpson had access to a few years ago in the United States, this would, because of the cost involved, be an affront to our human rights, collectively. 

Nonetheless, I believe in good examples, and I am sure that if prison franchises could be established in our countries we would all reap the benefits, as we are shamed into reforms. When we read that one factor making it particularly difficult for Schwarzenegger, the new Governor of California, to balance his state’s budget is the 28,500 dollars he has to spend each year on each of his 162,000 prisoners and that one of his options would be to use local private prison services, which would allow him to cut the cost to 17,000 dollars per prisoner per year, we see an opportunity. 

If California wants to save even more, it could do so by letting our countries offer prison services for some of its prisoners. Companies could build and operate prisons and would have to apply ISO 9000-type quality certifications. This would probably generate a set of global good prison practices that would benefit everyone. Nowadays, rapid transport and facilities such as videoconferences should make such proposals much more feasible. All that’s lacking is the will to carry them out. 

Since some people trace the origin of the violent maras (gangs) of Central America to Los Angeles, and since crime is to some degree attributed to the violence in films, perhaps California, its Governor, and even Hollywood all have a special motivation to welcome an initiative such as this one to help us help them. Besides, Schwarzenegger’s experience in the movies alone, which ranges from subduing criminals by force to teaching kindergarten, would seem to fit the ideal resume for a real super prison keeper. 

P.S. I just read in the press that Schwarzenegger refers to his experience in Kindergarten Cop as useful to handle the legislative branch in California… OK perhaps for that too. 

Translated from El Universal, July 15, 2004

PS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-13

PS. The Federal Government reports that the average yearly cost for a jailed prisoner in US 2021 was $43,836 ($120.10 per day).

PS. 2021-22, in California, the annual average cost to incarcerate an inmate in prison is reported to be US$ 106.000

PS. Holy Moley! @NYCComptroller reports that the annual cost of incarceration in New York grew to $556,539 a person per year – or $1,525 each day:  I think that figure might be wrong, but no one reacts to it?

PS. Now, 2023, when with natural horror looking at the images of the prisons/imprisonments Nayib Bukele has ordered in El Salvador, I cannot but help wonder what could have happened if California had helped El Salvador to afford building more decent prisons...these McPrisons

PS. Or what would have happened if all the emigrants of El Salvador, those who keep its economy afloat, had been much more politically empowered.

PS. A 2024 tweet: When a society cannot any longer afford humane prisons with which combat growing criminality, what option does it have?

https://x.com/PerKurowski/status/1725551118657192224

Here it was echoed by El Tiempo Latino, a brother of Washington Post

About prisoners, the old and the sick

About prisoners, the old and the sick

WE READ THAT IN THE United States there are approximately 2.2 million people dedicated to capturing and keeping 2 million prisoners behind bars. Imagine what it can mean for any country to capture even 1% of that market.

Other buoyant markets are those of the elderly care industry, whose demand in developed countries grows as the ratio of the number of young to old decreases. So are those in the long-term care industry, where continuous advances in medicine seem to generate almost infinite demand. 

It is strange then the insufficient attention that developing countries give to these services when negotiating their trade agreements, considering their current and competitive salaries, and that, on the other hand, it does force them to open up to the services sector via banking, insurance, auditing, etc. 

As an example, the economic impact to a poor country of a school that annually graduates a few thousand excellent bilingual nurses, to work around the world or in their own country, could exceed the benefits that a trade agreement would have on its agriculture and manufacturing industry combined. By the way, nurses would cancel their educational credits, perhaps even more easily than economists like me.

Furthermore, given the tensions that occur when millions of people seek to emigrate in any way to the labor markets of developed countries, in order to produce family remittances, it is surprising not to hear that the best way to avoid this illegal immigration, which is often destined in one way or another to care for prisoners, the sick and the elderly, it would be sending this same clientele to developing countries to be cared for. 

A real opening in services would allow poor countries to access sources of sustainable economic growth, while at the same time it would alleviate the pressures that the costs of caring for prisoners, the elderly and the sick exert on the finances of developed countries, to such a degree that They even threaten to make their own economies unsustainable. 

New ideas? No way! Papillon was sent prisoner to Guyana and Australia was founded with exported convicts. There are already European governments that pay in one way or another for the stay of their elderly in places like the Canary Islands, and history is full of examples of those who had to go to other places due to diseases such as tuberculosis.

Translated by Google from El Universal