In California You Can Pay To Upgrade Your Prison Experience

I’m no class warrior, but this is a joke (old article, I’m just catching on to it now):

Anyone convicted of a crime knows a debt to society often must be paid in jail. But a slice of Californians willing to supplement that debt with cash (no personal checks, please) are finding that the time can be almost bearable.
For offenders whose crimes are usually relatively minor (carjackers should not bother) and whose bank accounts remain lofty, a dozen or so city jails across the state offer pay-to-stay upgrades. Theirs are a clean, quiet, if not exactly recherché alternative to the standard county jails, where the walls are bars, the fellow inmates are hardened and privileges are few. . . .
“It seems to be to be a little unfair,” said Mike Jackson, the training manager of the National Sheriff’s Association. “Two people come in, have the same offense, and the guy who has money gets to pay to stay and the other doesn’t. The system is supposed to be equitable.”
But cities argue that the paying inmates generate cash, often hundreds of thousands of dollars a year — enabling them to better afford their other taxpayer-financed operations — and are generally easy to deal with. . . .

If the cost of prisons is the problem, we could start by addressing the reasons why America’s prison population is growing faster than the rest of the population. And a good start to that would be to end the “war on drugs,” which has been more useful as a way to waste trillions of our tax dollars on enforcement, trials and imprisonment than as a way to actually stop drug use.