RE: With Less Crime, Closed Dutch Prisons Are Instead Being Used To House Refugees

Interesting! I will note other benefits of less prisoners, that are directly proportional to jobs lost as a result of lower incarceration rates.

The labor of those previously needed to perform the distasteful and hazardous (particularly morally hazardous) job of keeping people in cages is available to provide goods and services and increase the standard of living of the country.

Also, while the incomes provided by those previously available jobs no longer is spent into the economy, the taxes providing that income, necessarily greater than the incomes they supported, are no longer extracted from the economy. Whenever taxpayer supported jobs are lost, there is a net increase in the standard of living in the country, as the taxes formerly extracted from citizens are instead spent by them on goods and services, saved, or gifted.

All of these benefits are in an ideal system. In an actual system in which corruption inevitably further exacerbates losses (and no industry more than prisons better illustrates this) due to government spending, when that supply of graft money is reduced, there are therefore more benefits the country, and it's citizens, when such spending is reduced.

Additionally, the psychological harm that is done to people when they are kept in cages is not minor, nor of little economic or moral consequence. In every species that has been studied, confinement in similar conditions dramatically increases health degradation, and thereby medical costs, as well as pain and suffering. No zoos treat other animals so poorly any longer, as it is both inhumane and economically less viable.

Were you to keep any other animal species in such conditions, you would rightly be charged with criminal mistreatment.

Often such psychological damage isn't limited to the people confined, but is passed on to their families, loved ones, and communities in various ways, notably as increased crime, creating a self perpetuating cycle of net economic losses, moral, and physical harm.

We can only hope that this better future soon is one America can hope to join, and that the most heavily incarcerated and enslaved country in the history of the world (all American prisoners are forced to work for wages as low as $1/day) might one day be again worthy of the name ''Land of the Free, Home of the Brave", instead of "Land of the Fee, Home of the Slave" it has earned today.