To answer the question do you prefer hunger or prison, there has to be some level of hunger, and some type of prison. Would you rather spend a week, beginning right now, in a US medium security prison in North Carolina, or eat nothing but four slices of bread a day for the next week?We could add a third component. Would you prefer 40 hours of work mopping floors during a week, a week of hunger, or a week of well-fed leisure in prison?At some point, when everyone is given free medicine and food stamps, people's disposition to work must run short. And I am generally curious whether people would rather be turned down at the grocery store at that moment, or put in prison. How diverse are people's preferences for one or the other, and how stable are a single individual's preferences over time?If you could write your own Constitution of Social justice, which of these two rights would take precedence, the right to incarceration or the right to hunger?I know North Korea shows that putting people in prison cannot solve the hunger problem, whereas the US shows that hunger can solve itself neatly. But I am still curious.

Four slices of bread a day isn't that bad. I'd assume most people would choose that over prison. Seems preferable to being raped, shanked or have something.

QuoteOriginally posted by: Hansi Four slices of bread a day isn't that bad. I'd assume most people would choose that over prison. Seems preferable to being raped, shanked or have something.Generally speaking, U.S. prisons are actually pretty safe.. and certainly this is true at the federal level, and "medium security" facilities like the question presupposes. In fact, a low-security federal facility in the U.S. is going to populated largely either by (a) white-collar CEOs (Martha Stewart, etc) who are passing through b/c of some bogus tax "glitch"; or (b) drug lords who need large amounts of cash laundered. Either way, it can be an interesting opportunity to do some business networking and make new contacts. It was Eisenhower who said that if you want the government to keep you "safe" and "secure," the first thing you should do is go check yourself into the nearest federal prison. Otherwise, you're on your own (i.e, Second Amendment). A lot's changed since then. Nevertheless, the question presupposes that prisons are there to serve some kind of social function, or social "justice", and I don't quite agree w/ this. Prisons are there for commercial purposes: they're profit centers for the government. The government views *all* crimes as "commercial," and it views prisons as no different than any other nascent high-growth profit-making industry. If I really needed four slices of bread that bad, I would steal them. And actually, I would steal a lot more than just four slices. Maybe four loaves.. maybe even more. Does that mean I get the bread and prison?

For me Mopping > Hunger > Prison.The bartender at local chain microbrewery is a 40 year old who can't afford to buy a house and can't even afford a new car. He seems like a shiftless sort of fellow until you talk to him. Then you discover he's a relatively smart, very personable, and does a great job both tending bar and managing the bar. In fact, according to corporate he's not suppose to do all the work he does, but he does it anyway because he like having a well-stocked, well-run bar. I asked him if he's ever considered taking a job as manager. He said that he's been offered the job. In fact one guy offered to let him run an entire restaurant. But he turns down all these offers because all he wants is lots of free time so he can go mountain biking, hiking, skiing, hanging with friends, etc. To the Bureau of Social Justice, this guy probably looks like one of the downtrodden, underprivileged folks in life whose stuck in a dead-end service job. But he not. He's simply made a different conscious choice about how he wants to live.Until everyone has the same willingness to work hard and the same propensity to save money, equality isn't possible. Except for places that have minimum wage laws and laws capping the workweek, almost every person on this planet could work 1% harder or longer and get just a little further ahead. Except for places that have corrupt financial systems, a solid 75% of the people on this planet could save just a little more money than they do.