Why I dislike economic arguments against imprisonment

This post was written in July, but I chose not to publish it for some reason. No longer seeing why not, I am publishing it today in lieu of writing a new post.

The Los Angeles Times reported that the state prison officials have been releasing parole violators early because county jails have been increasingly reluctant to house them. It's not that the county jails are reducing their capacity. They are simply turning to a more stable and lucrative source of revenue, i.e. immigration detainees who bring with them a sizable contract money from the federal government.

This is one of the reasons that I'm not comfortable with economic arguments against our criminal justice system. To say that we should stop prosecuting so many people because we can't afford to punish them all, may be true. But a logical response to such an argument is to find an affordable way to punish, not to stop prosecuting in the first place. So here we are...