Something worth looking into is the perverse relationship cities have with for profit prison systems which encourage mass incarceration for even non-violent offenses.
Do Private Prison Contracts Fuel Mass Incarceration?
The article presents no analysis of causation.
For example....
The study examined 62 private prisons contracts in 21 states. It found that the majority of these contracts guarantee that the state will supply enough prisoners to keep between 80 and 100 percent of the private prisons’ beds filled. If the state fails to fulfill this ‘bed guarantee’, it must pay a fine to the company running the prisons – in effect, paying for each prison bed regardless of whether it holds a prisoner. This incentivizes states to send prisoners to private prisons rather than state-run prisons in order to meet the bed guarantee, regardless of the prisons’ distance from families, their security level, or health conditions.
To incentivize sending convicts to private prisons could
simply mean that fewer are sent to government prisons.
In doing so, this would reduce government's costs in
their own prisons.
This contractual relationship doesn't appear to cause
the justice industrial complex (JIC) to want to imprison
more people.
In effect, this ‘bed guarantee’ payment structure penalizes taxpayers for low incarceration rates. This is a system that hurts both taxpayer and prisoner. Bed guarantees funnel taxpayer money into private prison profits at a time when states should see overall cost savings from successful attempts at curbing crime. Instead, when states reduce incarceration rates below lockup quotas, they compensate companies’ lost revenue at the per day rate, adding up to
millions of dollars in fines.
These are simply more detailed claims, not justification
of the larger claim.
I see a different set of problems....
Too much criminalization of harmless behavior, too much
reliance upon imprisonment, too much violence in prison
(both private & government), unfairness of the bail system,
government treating fines & penalties as a profit center, etc.