Cities and counties rely on U.S. immigrant detention fees

Municipalities in California and elsewhere—but mostly California—are increasingly tapping a new Federal revenue source.

Roughly two-thirds of the nation’s immigrant detainees are held in local jails, and the payments to cities and counties for housing them have increased as the federal government has cracked down on illegal immigrants with criminal records and outstanding deportation orders.

Washington paid nearly $55.2 million to house [immigrant] detainees at 13 local jails in California in fiscal year 2008, up from $52.6 million the previous year. The U.S. is on track to spend $57 million this year.

As usual, the details of profit-seeking behavior are even more outrageous than the supply-side nonsense:

Santa Ana’s Police Department, for example, expects as much as a 15% budget cut and has had a hiring freeze since October that has resulted in more than 60 sworn and civilian positions remaining vacant, Police Chief Paul Walters said. To offset reductions, Walters plans to convert two multipurpose rooms at the 480-bed jail into dormitory rooms this spring. That will accommodate an additional 32 immigrant detainees, which he expects will bring in $1 million more in revenue each year. He also hopes to get approval to raise the nightly price per detainee from $82 to $87.

“We treat [the jail] as a business,” Walters said. “The cuts could have been much deeper if it weren’t for the ability to raise money there.”

How Policy Distributes Wealth in the U.S.

This is the first part in what will probably be a three part series. It’s well-done and can be easily followed by most high-school students, though I’d also recommend Veronica Mars as another way to deliver the same message.

Algorithmic game theory

Noam Nisan, a computer science professor at Hebrew University, recently started a blog on algorithmic game theory. If you’re like me, you immediately wondered what this even means—a topic handled in the first real post:

When Eva Tardos, Vijay Vazirani, Tim Roughgarden and myself were editing our book on Algorithmic game theory we knew that we wanted to cover this general area (from a somewhat focused perspective due to our theoretical-CS background), but we were not really sure what to call it — neither the book nor the area. Christos had a strong opinion what the field should be called Algorithmic Game Theory, so we decided to stick with that for our book as well. While the name itself is somewhat imprecise (I personally am missing “Internet”, “Markets”, and “Computation” in the name, but you can’t have it all in a snappy name), it seems that Christos’s naming for the field is sticking, so I’m going with it.

So far, the posts are all quite readable and interesting; I expected something a little more dense and intimidating.

Thrifty business

Fantastic Journal, on frugal chic:

Our cities grow odd organic appendages at the weekends, temporary infestations from the countryside that spring up to sell expensive organic vegetables to a niche market troubled by supermarkets and urbanity. There is a sort of alchemy at work here, the turning of base metal into gold, or thrift into luxury. For coal tar soap and muddy potatoes were surely never meant to be luxury products. It takes a particularly weird intersection of class and socio-economics to make them so. And whilst Labour and Wait remains packed on a Sunday morning, my local Woolworths - that most genuinely thrifty of shops - is already a boarded up memory.

Charles Holland attributes some of the inspiration for his thinking to the recent Austerity Nostalgia post by Owen Hatherley.

The bees are back in town

Colony collapse disorder (CCD) once made headlines; now it’s the bee glut. While the cause of the former remains a mystery, the latter is largely economic:

The price of almonds dropped by 30% between August and December last year, as people had less money in their pockets. That has caused growers to cut costs, and therefore hire fewer hives. There is also a drought in the region, and many farmers are unlikely to receive enough water to go ahead with the harvest. Meanwhile, the recent high prices for pollination contracts made it look worthwhile fattening bees up with supplements over the winter. That may help explain why there have been fewer colony collapses.

The rise and fall of the managed honeybee, then, owes as much to the economics of supply and demand as it does to the forces of nature. And if the nutrition and disease theory is correct, next year’s lower contract prices may see beekeepers cutting back on supplemental feeding, and a resurgence of CCD.

Restaurant Menu Optimization

Links to a post from ThatsSoYummy about the profit-maximizing design strategies used by restaurants on their menus.

Missing dollar signs

The dollar symbol is missing next to the proces for a reason: That one little character ($) reminds you that you’re spending money. When Restaurants in one 2008 Cornell University study left dollar signs off the menu, the average check went up $5.55.