And maybe we should make their rich families pay for the bullets

Posted by Marc Hodak on July 20, 2009 under Stupid laws | 3 Comments to Read

No one can top a New York state legislator in achieving that delicate balance of self righteousness, populist money grubbing, and raw chutzpah:

Rich New Yorkers convicted of crimes would be forced — if [Republican Assemblyman Jim Tedisco’s] bill becomes law — to pay the state and federal governments for how much it costs to keep them in jail.

This is one of those ideas that sounded good when Jim was sitting on the toilet one morning, reading the paper about some illegally thrown bar mitzvah in a downtown prison.  “Hmm.  The rich have the money.  Why do we taxpayers have to pay to house them in prison?”  Naturally, he called his brainstorm the “Madoff bill” because everyone’s heard of Madoff who, as far as the law knows, doesn’t have a cent left.

A sliding scale would determine how much convicts would have to pay, based on their assets, under Tedisco’s bill.  Those who are worth $200,000 or more would pay the entire tab, while those whose net worth is $40,000 or less would pay nothing.

Once he was done pushing that one out, certain things should have occurred to him:

–  When someone is tried and convicted, legal penalties are pronounced at sentencing.  You can’t extract extra penalties after sentencing.

–  A person can only be sentenced for the crimes they committed.  Since this proposed penalty would be based on the person’s assets not already attached under sentencing, which one would think would fully account for ill-gotten gains, then this idea amounts to a penalty for simply being “rich,” which last I checked wasn’t a punishable offense, even in New York.

Fortunately for the entertainment value of this proposal, Tedesco’s economic illiteracy is even greater than his legal illiteracy:

Convicts’ homes “or any equity found in it” would not be counted in determining their assets nor would their mortgage payments, tax bills or payments for child or spousal support, Tedisco said.

I love that “any equity found in it.”  So you don’t have to bother looking under sofa cushions and in backs of closets to make sure you don’t miss any of that equity.  And not counting mortgage payments, tax bills, or certain other payments as assets is a big help since they…uh, aren’t assets.

Of course, the thing I hate the most about this bill is the economics.

The NY state government estimates each prisoner costs the state about $90 per day.  No one says how they got that number, so the reporter goes for the bigger number:

The state comptroller, Thomas DiNapoli, a Democrat, estimated in 2007 that it costs the counties around $1 billion a year, based on daily costs of $80 to $90 a day for each inmate.

The funny thing is that I’ll wager anyone–name your bet–that the way they originally came up with that daily cost per inmate was based on some actual total cost calculated some time before 2007, and divided it by the number of inmates at the time.  We know that the variable cost of shoving an extra person into an overcrowded prison is basically the cost of three lousy meals.

And the incentive here, besides targeting more “rich” people for prison, would be to operate prisons as inefficiently as possible in order to pawn off the extra costs on those “rich” inmate’s families.