The strongest-correlated single factor to violent crime is, in fact, lead pollution. When lead antiknock compounds were abolished in gasoline, and lead pigments abolished in paint, lead pollution peaked and began a long, steady decline. Violent crime followed. The prisoner incarceration rate has stayed high, despite the decline in violence, because of the money interests.
For-profit prisons are the ratchets that prevent the wheels of justice from turning backward. Sweden consolidates prisons and mothballs the emptied ones. America tricks the ignorant into fencing stolen bicycles and selling weed to informants.
Remove the profit, and you also remove the paradoxical idiotic behavior that generates it.
My outsider's perspective would first segregate all revenues from fines and forfeitures from justice budgets, perhaps exclusively dedicating them to public education and pollution abatement and cleanup. Then I'd abolish incarceration in any facility that was not entirely publicly owned and state-operated. I'd also abolish plea bargaining, as it seems a perversion of due process. After that, I'm not sure what else might help; keep following the money and pushing the Nash equilibrium toward "everyone respect the law and each other".
For-profit prisons are the ratchets that prevent the wheels of justice from turning backward. Sweden consolidates prisons and mothballs the emptied ones. America tricks the ignorant into fencing stolen bicycles and selling weed to informants.
Remove the profit, and you also remove the paradoxical idiotic behavior that generates it.
My outsider's perspective would first segregate all revenues from fines and forfeitures from justice budgets, perhaps exclusively dedicating them to public education and pollution abatement and cleanup. Then I'd abolish incarceration in any facility that was not entirely publicly owned and state-operated. I'd also abolish plea bargaining, as it seems a perversion of due process. After that, I'm not sure what else might help; keep following the money and pushing the Nash equilibrium toward "everyone respect the law and each other".