From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Mon Jan 29 2001 - 16:29:42 MST
"Ross A. Finlayson" wrote:
>
> Prisons are sad. Imprisoning each of the 2 million prisoners costs American
> taxpayers about 60,000 a year each, not to mention prison construction and
> labor costs. Two million times 60,000 is 120,000,000,000 dollars a year.
> Maybe the cost per prisoner is actually only 15,000 dollars a year, which it
> is not, then it would cost thirty billion dollars, a year. Perhaps these
> numbers are lower and higher, but they are illustrative.
"Any person who claims to have deep feeling for other human beings should
think a long, long time before he votes to have other men kept behind bars
- caged. I am not saying there shouldn't be prisons, but there shouldn't
be bars. Behind bars, a man never reforms. He will never forget. He
never will get completely over the memory of the bars."
-- El-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz (Malcolm X)
Sounds reasonable to me...
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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