Despite the article's inane attempts to link this to sex crimes, I see nothing wrong with this. Housing and feeding prisoners is a huge drain on society; a prisoner who alleviates that drain absolutely deserves a more humane experience. That's not to say that everyone else doesn't deserve a more humane experience, but we simply can't afford it. No one is suggesting we close down shelters and start housing the homeless in five star hotels, and no one seems to be too bothered by that. On the whole I'd rather money be spent first on that than upgrading prisons.
EDIT: As to the idea that this somehow reduces the effective punishment: while that might be true for the ultra-rich for whom $10k is irrelevant (but since when do they go to prison anyways?), for everyone else, having to fund your own incarceration [directly, in addition to funding everyone else's via taxation,] seems to offset that.
Incentives matter. If you allow prisons to charge for improved prisoner experience, you make the default prison experience the BATNA for negotiating how much money you give the folks running the prison.
Like, if you pay ransoms when terrorists take Americans hostage, you're funding kidnap-Americans-and-ransom-them businesses. If you pay prisons for more humane treatment, you're funding imprison-people-and-threaten-them-with-inhumane-conditions businesses.
We can. By simply releasing basically every prisoner. Literally less than 1% are truly such threats to society as to require the kind of sequestration that only prison can provide.
EDIT: As to the idea that this somehow reduces the effective punishment: while that might be true for the ultra-rich for whom $10k is irrelevant (but since when do they go to prison anyways?), for everyone else, having to fund your own incarceration [directly, in addition to funding everyone else's via taxation,] seems to offset that.