Regular readers of Daily Kos and the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy already knew this but a new study by serious folks might hammer the point home to local officials that the prison industrial complex is sucking the financial life out of State and local communities.
A study released Thursday examining what it actually costs to operate local lockups has found that a whole host of costs — from providing inmate health care to funding employee benefits — aren't always covered as line items in a corrections department's budget.
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Running the more than 3,000 county jails across the country, which nearly 12 million people pass through every year, is notoriously expensive and federal statistics put the price tag at about $22.2 billion.
But the Vera researchers, who surveyed 35 jails of all sizes from 18 different states with a combined average daily population of 64,920, found that another agency besides the corrections department or sheriff's office paid for costs representing between 1 percent and 53 percent of total jail costs.
The jist of the study is that when the cost of incarceration is put out to the public, it does not include a myriad of other services, including healthcare and logistical support, that end up bloating lean local budgets with no payback plan.
A couple very big examples:
The New York City Department of Correction, which runs the nation's second-largest jail system with about 11,000 average daily inmates, has a $1.1 billion budget. But an additional $1.2 billion from outside the budget is spent on jail operations such as inmate health care, education programs and pension obligations, the researchers found.
In Boulder County, Colorado, which has a $14 million annual jail budget for the 484 average daily inmates, another $4.6 million is spent on the jails from outside agencies. And King County Public Health paid $29 million in health care for Seattle, Washington, inmates last fiscal year, representing about 20 percent of all jail costs, the study found.
So New York City, which incarcerates more people than most countries, ends up spending more than twice the money budgeted to destroy lives. The study doesn't take into account families who've lost a provider that must lean on costly social services. It doesn't account for lost tax dollars from those providers. It doesn't account for the endless chain of disrupted communities who must shoulder life without mom or dad or son or employee.
Thankfully some local politicians are starting to notice that the government warehousing of it's citizens is neither "conservative" nor "fiscally responsible". Perhaps, if you want to shrink government till it's so small you can drown it in the bathtub, prison is a wonderful place to start.
In Albuquerque, New Mexico, where officials have instituted a series of criminal justice reforms such as issuing more citations than arrests, the jail population dropped over the course of fiscal 2014 by about 39 percent, from 2,496 inmates-per-day to 1,523. That decrease has allowed officials to stop spending money on out-of-county jail beds and to close a housing unit.
And in Springfield, Massachusetts, where dropping crime, fewer arrests and an increase of diversion and supervision programs resulted in a 30 percent drop in the inmate population between 2008 and 2014, the sheriff's department closed six 55-bed housing units among other cutbacks, saving the department $13.1 million.
Here is Vera's takeaway statement, which tree-hugging pussies have understood forever:
Decreasing the overall inmate population is the only way to achieve significant savings, the report concludes.
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"The surest and safest way to save money is to take steps to reduce the inmate population," Henrichson said.
Word.