A note:Our crim law reading for next week is an entire unit on law and economics. As I'm reading it, I couldn't help but come back to this essay. For example, Professor Gary Becker writes: "[T]he cost of an imprisonment is the discounted sum of the earnings foregone and the value placed on the restrictions in consumption and freedom." He then goes on to briefly discuss differential incomes and differing sentences before giving us a formula which he claims represents the "total social cost of punishments". Yet nowhere does he question whether his baseline assertion for calculating the cost of imprisonment is correct. While my essay focused on environmental issues, the more I read and the more I think about it, the more it becomes a problem of law and economics as an entire branch of thought.