Making imprisonment unprofitable
Making imprisonment unprofitable
复制标题
DOI：
10.1111/j.1745-9133.2011.00753.x
复制
发表时间：
2011-08-01
影响因子：
4.6
通讯作者：
Austin, James
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Austin, James
A lthough it might not be perfectly correct to say that America is a capitalist society, it cannot be denied that capitalism has a lot to do with how Americans behave and how we structure public policy. Put differently, if one wishes to restructure current public policy, then one must take into account the power of capitalism and traditional economic theory. This truism has many examples. Example A is the current tax code. Its purpose is to encourage economic gains in certain sectors of our economy. If we want to encourage people to buy houses, then we provide tax credits on the mortgage interest they pay. If we want people to buy solar systems or purchase more energy-efficient appliances and electric cars, then we provide tax credits. If we want people to stop smoking, then we impose high taxes on cigarettes to make them more unaffordable. In social policy, which is relevant to the question of how to reduce prison populations, two strong examples have been noted of using financial incentives to lower the people cared for by government. As reported by Spelman (2009) and Gottschalk (2009), the massive decarceration of state hospitals was the result of two developments. The first was the successful invention of mind-altering drugs like Thorazine that allowed mentally ill patients to be treated in community-based settings. But the other factor was the passage of Medicaid in which the federal government paid for the care of the mentally ill in local hospitals and nursing homes. These two developments reduced the state mental health population from approximately 560,000 in the 1950s to less than 100,000 today. The same effects have been noted for public welfare. To get people off welfare, we paid the states. In President Clinton's first campaign, he promised to" end welfare as we know it." When the 1996 law replaced the federal Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with a state-run Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), it was funded, in part,
