I also agree that once the sentence has been served, people should not be punished any further, except where the occupation requires a clean record. e.g. I would be OK with pharmacies requiring no arrest for drugs etc. as a condition for employment, or drivers without DWI convictions etc.
I guess my point is: its not a purely economic decision. Sure you're losing tax revenue, but that's because you're:
1) Protecting society from a person who has demonstrates some lack of understanding/acceptance of its rules.
2) Cause significant discomfort/pain to the perpetrator of the crime so that they realize the consequences of breaking the law and hopefully never do it again.
The US has about 4.4 percent of the global population and about 22 percent of the global prison population. So either we are seriously fucking up as a country and incapable of producing decent human beings, or our entire justice system is broken.
Something needs to be done differently at the systemic level that doesn't involved holding every individual fucked over by the U.S. personally accountable for being crushed under the wheels of the goddamn system.
On the other hand when someone boldly ignored certain moral rules, will the person continue to do so? I think it's pretty serious when someone else had to suffer because of that.
Note that that's not an exclusive or; both can be true, and it's even plausible that there's a positive feedback loop between the two—that is, we have worse people because of our massive imprisonment, and can't get political support to end mass imprisonment because people correctly fear the near-term results given the way in which those in in prison are socialized (and even often preferring more imprisonment from perfectly legitimate fears of the way many people not in prison are socialized due to our mass imprisonment system.)
Which isn't to say we shouldn't bite the bullet and end the system, but just that we'll have lots of near term problems when we do and lots of political difficulty in actually doing it.
That is the fundamental question of the sentencing phase of a trial (which is why if you’re unfamiliar with criminal trials, that they’re basically “retrying” a defendant they’ve already found guilty might seem weird), and I agree with the other commenters that it should stop there. Holding people back from regular employment directly causes recidivism. Unemployment and crime are correlated. You can’t just pull people out of society because they erred once, and this is why convictions with priors are worse than without; that question is being answered for you.
You want fewer people in prison and safer communities? Let felons work, fire them when they don’t, or they’ll get the money in other ways. It’s genuinely as simple as that. Beside the DUI crowd, half the minimum security inmates I spent time with were there for check fraud, petty theft, and other crimes to feed themselves or their kids. Many had priors, sometimes several, making one guy I met who had passed a $750 bad check stare down the barrel of a ten stretch.
Think about this: upon my conviction I lost the ability to both vote and leave the country. I have both back now (with effort), but even looking at this situation macroeconomically, what is that saying about even first time offenders?
The tickets had something else in common. Brownsville, the South Bronx, East Harlem, Bed-Stuy (at least eight years ago, when the ticket was issued), all of them are neighborhoods with large black or Hispanic, and very small white, populations. It was then that it became clear to me: the reason for the tickets wasn’t that these Lisa Davises were petty criminals.
If you are the wrong color and live in the wrong part of town, you get criminalized for existing. Then when something does go really wrong, you can be railroaded.
Derreck Hamilton* was a black kid guilty of minor bullshit who spent years and years in prison for a murder he did not commit (because some asshole cop was out to get him and he got railroaded). So, acting like not sending poor, non-whites to prison for basically existing somehow will make life scarier is basically racist bullshit. Or perhaps simply clueless about how things work in this country.
* http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/06/20/derrick-hamilto...
The prison sentence is the punishment for the crime. After people are let out of prison they should be reintegrated into society.