I advocate for building more low-level prisons because they're vastly cheaper and better suited for people who've committed minor crimes. I get more pushback on this from the anti-prison crowd than when I advocate for more maximum security prisons.

It has started to feel like they're for anything that makes prisons unworkable, even if it kills prisoners in the meantime and leaves others on the street, than reforming the system because they wouldn't be able to argue against a humane and proportional prison.

Prisons suck but they suck less than it did without them. Without alternative ways to handle the preexisting problems prison abolition is a step backwards.

I doubt they are more against building "low-level prisons" than they are against building "maximum security prisons" -- they are just against building prisons, period.

If you build prisons, they will be filled. When you have lots of hammers, everything is nails.

My belief is that we don't need to keep building new prisons and if we invested in addressing people's basic needs and had better mental and healthcare we'd see less crime. Incarceration is an expensive way to not really solve the problem of crime.

Even if we assumed the interventions would work we have a current wave of low-to-medium level crime and we need a current solution for people who are being arrested 100+ times per year, and/or avoid all arrest by staying under unwritten minimums of damage. If dealt with they have to be put somewhere and if the default is to build maximum security prisons, that's what we'll do, or maybe just over-stuff the ones we have making them more dangerous.

If we did build low-level prisons we'd not only have a solution for the interim, but it'd be an improvement over current conditions. I think they'd not only handle the new crime, but could pull non-violent offenders from the existing prisons as well - reducing overcrowding and better handling the actual danger the prisoners pose.

> Incarceration is an expensive way to not really solve the problem of crime.

Sure, and fire trucks don't solve fire. But both are part of the solution.

> addressing people's basic needs

What about crime that's not caused by poverty or need, like rape? There'll always be a need to lock people up.

I share the goal of lowering that number but I can't see how it gets to zero.

> and had better mental and healthcare we'd see less crime

Prisons aren't alone in not working as intended - that award goes to most one-size-fits-all government programs.

Those interventions aren't actually likely to solve the problem. They'll misdiagnose the problem, pick a horrible solution, and fail to execute properly anyways. I've seen this first hand with drug policy and addiction treatment. Our over-funded system is the most dangerous place to be. An addict on the streets of some poor city in the middle of nowhere has better outcomes.

We've built lots and lots of prisons. The USA has more incarcerated people per capita than anywhere else on the planet.

Certainly we still have problems with violence and other kinds of harm done by people to people.

If you think building more prisons will solve these problems (which are probably various and not uniform or monolithic), when we already incarcerate more people than literally anywhere else on the planet, I think the burden of proof is on you to show that building more prisons will somehow help. It doesn't seem obvious to me. As you say, building more prisons does not seem to me to be an intervention likely to help, as demonstrated by our experience so far.

We've currently got minor criminals in maximum security because there's a lack of low-level capacity. Simply building enough minimum security cells for the minor criminals already in the system would be more appropriate treatment, would aid rehabiliation, and would reduce overcrowding of actually dangerous prisoners. Further, the cost of incarceration scales with the security required, this would save money.

In addition, there'd now be a reasonable punishment for small crimes and we could start punishing people who now fall through the cracks before they become a problem.

> I think the burden of proof is on you to show that building more prisons will somehow help.

You're not using them correctly. Stop breaking the system by putting mental patients and minor criminals in prisons. Stop overcrowding, underfunding, letting sadists be guards, etc, etc, and then see if they work.

Besides, I'm not saying more, I'm saying new and appropriate ones. You can repurpose the old ones once prisoners are transferred.

This is why people are more against minimum-security prisons than maximum; minimum security prisons are an easy and obvious win and it hurts the "all prisons bad" narrative by showing the options aren't just gulags or nothing.