And their point is? Do they think prisoners are free men?
Okay, this just came up on my more liberal board. The going concern is that prison is basically "slavery 2.0/3.0", that people are enriching themselves off the back of subsidized cheap prison labor. More importantly, because they want said cheap labor, that they are thus pushing for "tough on crime" sentencing intended to put low risk offenders in prison for long terms in order to exploit their labor cheaply.
Socialized cost - keeping them in prison, Private profit - their sub-minimum wage labor.
Making it worse in some ways, a few prison managers, when faced with an order to release their safest prisoners in order to save money, responded with "But how will we get our work done without the trustees?"
MechAg94 - Yeah, it is a problem. I see three courses I would take to try to remediate it. In the short term though, I wouldn't have much choice but to have a poop patrol. Even if it is expensive, it's a job that needs to be done.
Longer term:
1. Fix the housing problem, whatever it takes. Make it easy for developers to make cheap dense housing, for example.
2. Fix the mental healthcare system. Whether they're drug addicts or mentally ill, they need to be in an asylum of some sort treating them as best as practical with modern medicine. Keep in mind that a number of the addicts are also mentally ill, using illegal drugs to try to treat an illness that they couldn't afford to have treated professionally.
3. Stop tolerating homeless camps but also stop taking measures though that merely attempt to drive the homeless away by doing things like removing public bathrooms, putting spikes over everything, making benches uncomfortable, etc...