Mass Incarceration is Costing Taxpayers Billions

By Adrian Casas on February 10, 2016

Occupy.com

There are many moral reasons why people would like to stop mass incarnation from happening. Besides, most people have seen or read the statistic that the United States has five percent of the world population yet twenty-five percent of the entire prison population. As a finance buff, I look into the cost of financial benefits and costs of products, goods, and services all the time.  But if you are not morally worried about this issue, I would like to show financial statistics.

According to the 2012 study by Vera Institute of Justice, mass incarceration is costing taxpayers in forty states approximately $39 billion annually. The cost is highly due to the privatization of prison, which private for-profit companies such as GEO Group are taking advantage. Taken into account that over half of prisoners return to jail, the costs adds up relatively quick.

GEO Group

In the state of New York, taxpayers pay about $60 thousand on average per prisoner annually. With about 60,000 in the prison population, the state spends approximately $3.6 billion annually to various jails.

Critics suggest that instead of placing inmates who are in prison for drug-related, we should place them in rehabilitation centers; it can save a lot of money. A study titled “Lifetime Benefits and Costs of Diverting Substance-Abusing Offenders From State Prison” from the Crime and Delinquency journal stated that if ten percent of drug abusers in the prison system went to a rehab facility, it would save about $4.8 billion annually nationwide. If the percentage went up to forty, then we would save $12.9 billion annually.

Also, educating prisoners are also a cheaper option. According to RAND, a nonprofit research organization, inmates who participated in an education program within the correctional facility were 43 percent less likely to return to prison. With that said, it cost about $1,600 to educate an inmate, while recidivism cost around $9,200 per inmate.

With the many critics of the criminal justice system and the amount of protest that is going on daily fighting police brutality, it is pretty clear that there is pressure from the people to lower incarnation rate both from a moral and financial standpoint.

Thankfully, there is some hope. People on both sides of the aisle politically are working hard to fix the mess that was created in the 1980s and 1990s of being “hard on crime” and jailing many people over drug charges with over the top time sentences. It has worked in many states so far with hundreds of millions of dollars of savings.

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