According to this article it casts $132k per inmate per year to keep people incarcerated. It stays in business because the US prison system generates $74 billion a year for private corporations on the backs of the American taxpayer. From charging inmates for every phone call they make on their tablet, while stripping away in-person visits, to removing libraries of physical books and charging inmates huge sums of money to "rent" a digital book.
What feels most appalling about this to me is that society is willing to pay over $100k a year for an inmate to stay in jail, but would be unwilling to give that same person $50k a year on the outside to relieve their scarcity and stay out of jail. It's baffling to me that people are willing to fund corporate profits instead of simply respecting people and alleviating many of the confounding factors that cause people to commit crimes because it would be a "hand out".
Basic income works. Over and over again it's been shown to work at making people's lives better. There is plenty of money, at least the very rich have hoarded plenty of money, to afford basic income which means if we're unwilling to distribute that money to people in need, it's not about being uncomfortable with a hand-out, it's about cruelty.
Of course the rich love to tell themselves that they did everything on their own, often neglecting the huge sums of money their very rich parents gave them or the introductions that their rich parents made for them. The rich love to say that they did it on their own because that means the poor made their own choices, and criminals got what they deserved. The system is working as intended and we shouldn't even think about changing it to fix the structural societal problems that capitalism is currently inflicting on us.
A great alternative to this is the world represented in Quill & Still. At times I could feel the anguished astonishment as the main character realised that they would never be thrown out, that they were a member of society and had value because they were a member of society. Sure it's fiction, but if so many tech bros can model their vision of the future after science fiction, why can't we start to model our vision of the future after something better.
