The Appeal: The Incalculable Costs of Mass Incarceration
Prisons carry enormous, perhaps impossible to measure social costs—but when assessing the system fiscally, reformers should focus on staffing salaries instead of the number of incarcerated people.
Every year states spend about $50 billion to lock up over 1.3 million people, or about $35,000 per prisoner per year. Although individual state averages obviously vary, statistics like these suggest that even small cuts in prison populations could yield significant fiscal returns, and big cuts something massive. The Brennan Center, for example, recently argued that releasing 576,000 low-risk inmates could save $20 billion per year (which is just $35,000 times 576,000—a calculation others make as well).
But this is the wrong way to think about prisoners and costs. Measuring costs this way both significantly overstates what we fiscally save with each person we divert from prison while simultaneously understating the social costs that such a diversion avoids. Fiscal savings don’t come from reducing inmate populations—they come from reducing staffing. And the social costs of prisons and jails have little to do with budgets and far more to do with the physical, emotional, mental, and other harms incarceration imposes on inmates, their families, and their communities.
Whether we are trying to understand how decarceration frees up funds to be spent elsewhere, or whether prison is socially cost-benefit justifiable, using the average cost per prisoner—a common metric—is simply mistaken.
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I also would like them to consider what happens to an inmate’s family when that family is suddenly deprived of one of its wage earners (or perhaps the only wage earner). The family is often forced to turn to public assistance. That is worsened when “tough on crime” judges hand down extra long sentences in order to impress the voters. Then when you are finally paroled, you yourself often have to rely on public assistance because it is so much harder to get hired. It all adds up.