Thursday, June 30, 2005

What is jail time worth?

A man whose child molestation conviction was oveturned because a judge ruled the witnesses had been coerced may collect a bundle. He has to prove that he was, in fact, innocent, and that "he didn't contribute to his own arrest." But if he can do that, he's entitled to $100 for each day he was in prison.

It seems reasonable to me that a person who is wrongly convicted deserves compensation for the time spent in prison, and I'd make a case for a higher amount. A hundred dollars a day works out to $4.17 per hour. (I'm counting all 24 hours, because I'm assuming a person in prison might prefer to sleep somewhere else.) The Federal minimum wage is $5.15, and the California State minimum wage is $6.75. That works out to $123.60 and $162 per day, respectively, and disregarding overtime. If every hour past the eighth hour is counted as overtime at time-and-a-half, then the compensation amounts would be $164.80 and $216, respectively.

Then there's my rule of thumb for deciding what "reasonable" compensation is. Prisons are not known for being pleasant places to dwell. It seems reasonable to ask how much you'd have to pay the average "reasonable person" to induce him or her to spend a day in prison, with all the "features" prisoners are subject to (confinement, regimentation, prison discipline, prison food, intrusive searches, abuse from other prisoners including a significant risk of prison rape, and for convicted molesters, a significant risk of being killed).

John Stoll has not been proved guilty, and spent ten years subject to all the frills associated with being a convicted child molester. He's filed suit for over $50 million, which works out to over $110 per hour.

If burns in the lap from spilled coffee are worth half a million (where it wound up after appeals), ten years in prison should be worth at least a little bit more.

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