The cost of warehousing prisoners in California is high. By high, I mean incredibly expensive.
The cost of imprisoning each of California’s 130,000 inmates is expected to reach a record $75,560 in the next year. That’s enough to cover the annual cost of attending Harvard University and still have plenty left over for pizza and beer.
This is totally true, provided you drink domestic beer and aren’t too demanding about toppings on your pizza. It’s also the sort of comparison that shallow people conflate with actual alternatives rather than a shocking metric.
At $75,560, housing a prisoner in California now costs more than a year at Harvard https://t.co/g06HJsDZyC
— deray mckesson (@deray) June 5, 2017
Deray’s twit brought the expected reactions, as if this means that if we just shut down the prisons, we send everybody to Harvard (or Stanford, since this is California, after all). Much as the prospect is alluring, it’s the sort of comparison that breeds unavailing ideas and ultimately proves counterproductive.
First, the reason most people end up in prison is because they’ve committed a crime. I know, there are reasons, but if you’re the guy who got bashed on the head with a bat, the systemic racism and poverty isn’t your foremost concern.
Second, the cost of one may be more than sufficient to pay for the other, but the two are otherwise not comparable. The skillset needed to commit crimes isn’t the same as success in college.
Third, a large part of the reason for the excessive cost of imprisonment is that we don’t herd prisoners like cattle. We try to prevent the occasional rape, maybe even rehabilitate them so they don’t bang you over the head when they come out again. We try to feed them food that your dog wouldn’t refuse. It all costs money, especially for the retraining of guards who aren’t sure if boiling inmates to death is a bad thing.
Would we save a ton of money if we stopped sending people to prison for jaywalking, cut the length of sentences down from life plus cancer? You bet. That would free up the money for more pleasant uses, whether college or, maybe, even lower taxes.
But what it would not do is take the people who are now taking the bus to prison and buy them a ticket on the bus heading for Cambridge. We still need prisons. Most prisoners wouldn’t do well at Harvard. Most didn’t do well at P.S. 128 either.
Our system is bizarrely skewed toward paying for prisons rather than schools, handcuffs rather than lunches, but playing the assumption that less of one means more of another doesn’t work. There is the “criminals must go to prison” constituency, and the “everyone should go to college” costituency. Ironically, there is far more overlap between the two than people appreciate, so rather than trading one off against the other, we end up paying for both. What about the children?
And, despite all the passionate pleas for love and tolerance, Harvard doesn’t want them anyway.
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Send them to Evergreen College! That place is already enough of a shitshow. And $75K a year is probably enough to pay for 20 students there.
Plus the cost of bats. Today might be a good day to invest in Louisville Slugger stock.
Bats? Did I miss something?
Fear has overtaken the students at Evergreen. Should someone suggest anything untoward, like Evergreen is a college of opportunity, they now carry bats to correct the violent speech.
E-mails are more dangerous than bats now? Is that the 21st century equivalent of “the pen is mightier than the sword”?
Speech is violence. How else to end it if not with bats?
To your 10:34 comment:
Bike locks, I guess: https://blog.simplejustice.us/2017/06/04/a-utopian-interrogation/#comment-147045
Yup. Bike locks too.
More like “we can’t speak here, this is bat country.”
And hell, they accept like 98% of applicants, so you know most of them could end up getting in.
You know, just in case they don’t meet the standards of Harvard.
Any less and they would be selective, which means they discriminate. The one thing they do not do at Evergreen is discriminate.
Especially not by having a day of forced racial segregation. Definitely not.
Well, if we can put a man on the moon why can’t we send these people to Harvard?
Harvard Yard, prison yard … what’s the diff?
I’m convinced.
https://youtu.be/hXsDQLR8lns
I might give blood twice, if you go with Oberlin tomorrow.
So two people should suffer with your blood?
Bill and I both got transfusions from Barleycorn. I don’t see the big deal.
That explains your taste for brains. A mind is a terrible thing to waste.
Make that, a Terrible Mind is a Thing to Waste,… post haste. Otherwise, no, not now, not ever, no-way, Jose!
Transfustions from BC? No, say it ain’t so. Let’s get Real hear now!
We luv Haaarvad “college”, and Cambridge, but not in our backyard, if you catch our drift? How many eggheats can you sit on a picket fence? Without breaking one?
Many prisoners would have a good argument that sending then to Harvard would constitute cruel and unusual punishment. Different story if they were sent to that other school in The People’s Republic of Cambridge.
Well. I’m amazed no one picked up on the domestic bear in the comments.
Me too. That’s usually the first thing to go around here.
It costs $3000US per prisoner per year in Malaysia. $75,000 is ridiculous!
The USA should subcontract and save billions! ..and from what I hear not many prisoners want to go back and bust rocks again.
The irony is that for $75,000 per prisoner, you would think we could not kill, starve, boil them to death or let them die of illness. They should be living in the luxury compared to the income of most American families. Yet, we fail on all counts despite this outrageous cost.
It’s not just private prisons. It’s not just prison guard salaries. Where does the money go?
CoreCivic’s 5.7% dividend is 10% of annual income. Add in a couple percent for the interest paid on bond debt and this is right around the 12% profit margin. All of the profits are being paid out to investors.
The vast majority of prison expenses are operational (less than 10% of annual income is administrative). That said, yearly operating expenses in 2016 were $1,553,369,000 for ~90,000 beds. That’s an expense of $17,259. That’s a very significant difference from the $75,000 that California is paying.
Something clearly doesn’t add up here.
No, something doesn’t add up.
The government run facilities cost even more than the average figure. California pays $21k per privately housed inmate, while it pays $71k for the rest ($32k security, $12k support, $22k medical, $5k institution administration). The remaining budget (for rehab, legal, HR, administration, etc.) is an additional $8k. That brings it up to $79k.
The largest chunk goes to running secure facilities and paying guard salaries. The state apparently has ~2.5 times more employees per inmate than the private operators. The second largest chunk goes to health care, at almost twice what they pay for all other living expenses (the third largest chunk) combined. For that price they should be receiving the highest quality care (like Shiloh Heavenly Quine?). The fourth largest chunk goes to CDCR administrative costs (10% of the total budget). Smaller amounts go to parole and rehabilitation programs.
Given the 2x or greater cost differences between private- and public-run facilities, it seems at least possible that we could lower costs overall while simultaneously treating prisoners more like humans.
Reading the numbers doesn’t answer the question. It’s whats concealed behind the numbers that makes no sense. There’s a significant reality gap between how this looks from a distance versus what actually happens in prisons. The numbers may well reflect actual budgets, but not reality inside.
Prison medical care is extremely expensive, especially prison psychiatric care.
It’s about the worst job around for a medical professional that requires having a license, so the pay the correctional system has to offer is outrageous (and they still often get the bottom of the barrel).
Um, where in this AP/L.A. Times piece did the author(s) advocate sending California inmates to Ivy League schools? I don’t see such advocacy; the focus seems to be directed at public sector employee costs:
“The price for each inmate has doubled since 2005, even as court orders related to overcrowding have reduced the population by about one-quarter. Salaries and benefits for prison guards and medical providers drove much of the increase.
The result is a per-inmate cost that is the nation’s highest — and $2,000 above tuition, fees, room and board, and other expenses to attend Harvard.
Since 2015, California’s per-inmate costs have surged nearly $10,000, or about 13%. New York is a distant second in overall costs at about $69,000.”
Are prison staffing levels determined by collective bargaining agreements?
“For example, the corrections department has one employee for every two inmates, compared with one employee for roughly every four inmates in 1994.”
…or is it political expediency?
“California was sued over prison overcrowding, and to comply with a federal court-imposed population cap, the Brown administration now keeps most lower-level offenders in county jails instead of state prisons. Additionally, voters in 2014 reduced penalties for drug and property crimes and last fall approved the earlier releases.
State Sen. Jim Nielsen (R-Gerber) said reformers falsely promised a “prison dividend” from savings related to the changes. Instead, there’s now an uptick in many crimes and he’s worried it will lead to an influx of new inmates that will cost more to house.
Joan Petersilia, co-director of the Stanford Criminal Justice Center, said it was “highly predictable” that per-inmate costs would increase even as the population decreased.
“We released all the low-risk, kind of low-need, and we kept in the high-risk, high-need,” she said.
I can explain it to you, but I can’t understand it for you.
Oh, Come on – Pleeeaaseeeee!!!!!
With a cherry on top? You didn’t say anything about a cherry.
I guess reading comprehension must require projecting what isn’t there now; otherwise one might realize that an article that oddly compares prison costs to Harvard’s in its headline is actually focused in the body on the fact that reducing the prison population of California has increased the state’s cost per capita significantly in the last two years.
But not everyone has your ability to read a headline and first paragraph, O Wise Sage.
I’m deeply saddened that you feel that way, but I’ll get over it. In the future, should you comment elsewhere, you might get a better explanation if you didn’t start out as a dick.
You might also do well to consider why you don’t get it when others seem to have no problem understanding the point. It’s usually a good indicator that you, rather than everyone else, might be the asshole.