Summary
A 15-year-old boy was sentenced to life in prison for fatally stabbing a stranger, Muhammad Hassam Ali, after a brief conversation in Birmingham city center. The second boy, who stood by, was sentenced to five years in secure accommodation. Ali’s family expressed their grief, describing him as a budding engineer whose life was tragically cut short.
Except, in the long run, it’s not. It’s only cheaper within the scope of one or two election cycles. Over the long haul, weighing the costs and economic benefits of making person a productive member of society again, it’s way cheaper to do that. But nobody ever won an election promising to spend more money now so that we don’t have to spend nearly as much in a few decades.
You are not including the “cost” of recidivism.
If he kills again after you release him, you have to include that “cost” on top of everything you spent to try to bring him back into society. Even if you get the recidivism rate down to an extraordinary 1%, 1% of the value of an innocent life is worth more than the costs of caging a hundred murderers for the rest of their lives.
When you include the typical risks of recidivism, the cost of rehabilitation greatly exceeds that of permanent incarceration.