Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/06/03/shared-microbial-destiny-2.html
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“… limiting prisoner health-care is financially imprudent, creating the conditions for pandemics that endanger whole prisoner populations…”
I guess that this depends on the value to the system of a live prisoner over a dead prisoner. America… fuck… yeah.
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So is this cruel or unusual? 
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Sadly, it doesn’t appear to be “unusual”.
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There were a lot of progressives that cheered London’s congestion-charge, but for all the good the charge did in reducing emissions in the capital, it’s also incredibly discriminatory.
Any simplistic regressive tax is. This one for inmates is particularly and – for the U.S. – typically cruel and stupid, but useful disincentives like congestion or parking fees can be made more progressive by linking them to things like purpose of trip, book value of vehicle, number of passengers, or exceptions/lower fees for commercial vans and trucks (esp. if they’re low/no-emission). The problem can be solved within its own parameters as long as there’s the will to do so, and without precluding revenues like progressive income taxes and application of those funds to the common good.
limiting prisoner health-care is financially imprudent, creating the conditions for pandemics that endanger whole prisoner populations, as well as nearby communities.
Come on, everyone knows that microbes always stop at prison walls when trying to leave, just as they stop at the boundaries of gated communities and the compounds of rugged individualists when they try to enter.
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I am so used to living in Illinois that I read the headline, and the entire article, as if Illinois was voting to create, not eliminate the copay. I clicked on to the source looking for the name of the bill so I could protest to my representative in the assembly when I realized it was getting rid of the injustice, not creating a new one. That’s what living in Illinois does to you: you just kind of assume the worst. Very bad for my reading comprehension.
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Surely its not all bad?
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I’m for a $5 co-pay, scaled as a ratio of prison wages:minimum wage. So if they’re making $0.11/hour, then they ought to pay $0.05. They may be in prison for a reason, but they are still in prison. This is bullshit.
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Yes.
(it’s making me post more than nine characters, so ignore this line.)
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Well, they don’t make money off the state for dead prisoners, so I’m guessing live ones.
But, that being said, our current penal system makes it really easy to fill those empty spots eh?
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Sure, you can go to the doctor, but he’s going to need a carton of cigarettes or four cans of tunafish.
Man, it must be such a careful balancing act for the prison owning corporations. Is a live slave more cost effective than an empty cell. I guess it will be until they decide to charge the tax payers for whole months of incarceration in advance.
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As the Border Patrol gets going on their mass capture program, the value of an empty cell may rise.
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Having gutted progressive income tax and inheritance taxes, creating mass inequality and starving the treasury, we run out of money for transit, health care and environmental remediation.
This.
The prison-related problem is serious, particularly in that many of these prisoners would be eligible for Medicaid on the outside. (Certainly they would be eligible at five cents an hour!) The entire problem of copays is also serious - I know it’s a worry for many of my clients.
But starving the treasury is absolutely the road to squalor, and the US has been barreling down that road for a long, long time. I’m old enough to remember a nation that could put a man on the moon. Can you imagine that conversation today?
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Fairly directly relevant to that:
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I wonder how long it will be before the economics of the situation leads to Border Patrol forces crossing in to Mexico to round up “potential illegal immigrants” and bringing them into the US for “preemptive incarceration” in America’s Slavery For Profit Service?
Man, this is getting really depressing really quickly, but yeah, there was a time when the US govt. paid bounties on Native American scalps, and some people just raided mexican villages, because who can tell the difference between NA hair and Mexican hair amiright?
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