Never mind the nonlinear severity function of time in prison. Which gives me another idea - fungible jail time. I'd have spent a day in jail for Aaron.
Connected in what way? Bernie Madoff isn't going to find any friends to do time for him.
Monetary compensation though? That's a whole nother can of worms. Although I've got to wonder if the incentives are aligned such that it would encourage better prison conditions.
How about Al Capone. They had a hard enough time putting him away, if he could have mobsters rotate through jail to do time for him they would have never kept him behind bars.
hm. Well, if we allow a volunteer to stop volunteering at any point, this necessitates that the actual inmate remains in jail (concurrently) until the original sentence is completely fulfilled. So a 20 year gangbanger rap might turn into 4 5-year sentences. Or 20 1-year sentences. But the latter might be foolish, as the gang would lose power if most members were out of the game.
Just was trying to think of ways for 'social proof' that certain sentences were outrageous and ridiculous (beyond juries, since their "peer" requirement has been effectively destroyed in today's specialization-based society).
I've spent some time thinking about this myself, and about time vs money tradeoffs. Depends on what you think prison is for. If it's rehab, rehabbing a group of friends doesn't seem to work. If it's a safe place to keep bad people, you're not keeping them there. If it's about punishment, then maybe.
But prison sucks not just because you have to eat crappy food. It's because you have to eat crappy food everyday. If a rotating crew each serves one day, what's that? I can go a day without eating. This is a sum of the parts less than the whole situation. And the key is that people in jail aren't free to pick their schedule. You don't get to swap out with a buddy so you can attend your sister's wedding. If you're stuck in a shitty place unless you get someone to cover your shift, you're not in prison. You're working at walmart.
Incidentally, I've read that hiring prison doubles is a thing in China. It's illegal, so you're effectively under house arrest for the duration to avoid detection, but you're also not in prison. The guy you hired to show up and say your name is.
If a sentence is outrageous, you get a crowd of people to march around and protest until the governor or president grants a pardon. That's the existing process to deal with exceptional circumstances.
> rehabbing a group of friends doesn't seem to work
And if it were gangsters, it seems like it would have the opposite effect. Three square meals a day and some downtime to plan your next misdeed. And heck, the same goes for activists actually. So there would have to be no personal contact. Not that the US prison system is in any way about rehab.
> If it's a safe place to keep bad people, you're not keeping them there ... This is a sum of the parts less than the whole situation
Well presumably only other bad people sign up to help out bad people, and the idea would be that only with enough support, the sum of the parts would indeed be reduced. Trying to gauge my own utility function, it feels that sentences from between 3 months to 2 years would have corresponding increasing harshness on life-as-I-know-it. Under and it's a vacation, over and my present existence is basically completely gone. Of course those with a different uh, world view, would have a wildly different utility function.
OTOH this is clearly not a DIY avenue, and if that political will were actually available, instead of further codifying the prison industry why not just actually fix the damned legal system instead - vague laws, prosecutorial overreach, understandable due process, right to representation, broken sentencing, etc.
