Spending that kind of money per prisoner is absolutely staggering. It is equivalent to:
Each prisoner has their own $400 per night hotel room
Each prisoner has all their meals in the hotel restaurant with a $50 budget for each of their three meals per day
Each prisoner has $50 per day for sundries (toothpaste, uniforms etc)
Each prisoner has their own 100% dedicated guard, assuming four shifts on a 7-day fortnight rotation whose payroll costs are 50% above USA median wage
At the end of every single day, every prisoner celebrates by drinking a whole $100 bottle of champagne
Sorry for the formatting fail, here's a second try:
Spending that kind of money per prisoner is absolutely staggering. It is equivalent to:
> Each prisoner has their own $400 per night hotel room
> Each prisoner has all their meals in the hotel restaurant with a $50 budget for each of their three meals per day
> Each prisoner has $50 per day for sundries (toothpaste, uniforms etc) Each prisoner has their own 100% dedicated guard, assuming four shifts on a 7-day fortnight rotation whose payroll costs are 50% above USA median wage
> At the end of every single day, every prisoner celebrates by drinking a whole $100 bottle of champagne
...I wonder how many prisoners you could save money on by telling them if they stay in the local Marriott and don't leave ever, the government will pay all their bills.
If you actually did that you would induce a much higher number of prisoners, so I’m not sure we can make that kind of comparison since the costs would quickly become unmanageable.
I suspect the first thing that's needed is a publicly accessible breakdown of public spending. Really quickly I imagine it would be clear what needs to be explained or not.
You can see a department of corrections cost which is roughly the first document divided by incarcerated individuals, as well as an additional cost which is almost double the Department of Corrections cost, which is stated as: Fringe Benefits, Pensions, and Medical Services
If I had to make a guess Pensions seem pretty suspicious.
So working staff from the original document is 9,714, 600mil is pensions for 13.5k people, leaving something like 1.8 bil for those 9,714 employees, facilities, programs, training, etc. Which is roughly 185k per person.
That doesn't seem too terribly outrageous to me. Why are there so many staff despite decreasing jail population seems like the most pressing question, but nothing I've read so far shouts outrageous corruption.
I think I misunderstood pensions. I suppose it is much more like a 401k, so when it says pension, that's probably almost exactly a 401k deposit except to NYSCR:
Guess these things are rather hard to understand as a financial layman. I don't know which interpretation is correct, or if something else is more correct.
A pension pays you a fixed rate per year until you die. Very different from a 401k. And that is why all these government entities have such hefty pension responsibilities. It seems absolutely stupid. Like, just do the math. What did these people think were going to happen 50 years down the road?
For a number of years, it was a tactic for resolving impasses between labor and management. Labor would accept a lower salary in exchange for a pension -- funded by expected growth rather than an investment account.
Everybody wins. Workers get a safe retirement. Management gets to hold the line on salaries.
Oops.
It might even have worked, if growth had continued the way it did in the 50s and 60s, where there was often 5% GDP growth. Then came the 80s. Things have leveled off at a reasonable 2% growth, but that's not enough to support all of these pensions. But the pension plans were promises, and not contingent on that.
So it's not quite as stupid as it sounded. But it's still pretty stupid. Everybody thought they were taking advantage of the other side.
1) Open and easily assessible accounting and tendering.
2) Auditors having ability to remove procurement staff that show they miss obviously 'better pricing'.
3) Spend less. I've pondered why prisons dont set up colonial type towns in remote locations for less than maximum security prisoners.
Make people work to provide their food and improve infrastructure. I imagine it would help develop many skills + better ready people to return to a world where they have to interact with people vs those high tension overcrowded prisons you see on TV. There'd still obviously be costs but you suspect something like this could be a massive per-prisoner cost.
Move prisoners out into the wilderness so it's even harder for them to maintain social (familial) connections they will rely on once they leave the prison system.
In an ideal world, maybe what you describe would work. In the punitive and unfair justice system that the US runs, you're just making prisoners' lives worse.
Yes it does seem way off the mark. Seems better to give the money to the individuals on promise of turning around their lives .. in non-violent cases. (I'm not totally serious here, just expressing that some/most criminals may choose to turn around their lives given funds like that.)
Admittedly I have a bias prompting these two questions, and I'm going to be upfront: I think incarceration in the US is intentionally punitive for profit and control, not responsive to any particular crime problem. That said...
I'm not good at finance, and I mean these questions sincerely:
1. What do you think would be an appropriate per-inmate budget?
2. What parts of the existing budget do you think are corrupt and could be reformed?
- - -
Third question, because well, I already laid my bias cards on the table:
Why is cost the concern? If there's rampant corruption in incarceration, why are you focused on the money spent and not the human toll of a corrupt prison system housing millions of human beings?
> 1. What do you think would be an appropriate per-inmate budget?
A better question is, exactly how is that $500k being spent?
> Why is cost the concern? If there's rampant corruption in incarceration, why are you focused on the money spent and not the human toll of a corrupt prison system housing millions of human beings?
$$ cost, corruption, and 'human toll' are all concerns, and in this case may well be related. Of those 3, $$ cost is the easiest to measure. If your goal is to solve any or all of the above problems, investigating $$ cost is likely to be the most tractable approach.
The average household income in the US is about $88,000. The average household size is about 2.5 people. So the average person in the US is maintained on about $35,000 per year. This doesn’t include the reduction due to taxes, but in principle on average the reduction in taxes is returned back in the form of the average government spending per person, so we can call that a wash.
The fact that it is more than 14 times more expensive to maintain a person in prison vs out of prison is immediately suspicious.
The average person isn’t being held in a cage against their will, explicitly a charge of society, ostensibly for the purpose of rehabilitation, and widely understood to be under heightened threat of violence.
Probably somewhere around $200,000/year as a high water mark. That works out to the average cost of maintaining one person, plus 2x the average household income, which seems like a good proxy for the fully-loaded cost of maintaining a full-time staff member and associated infrastructure. Economies of scale suggest to me that at scale it should be possible to support a ratio of staff:inmates that is less than 1:1.
It's a better question assuming that one's primary goal is to find a solution to the problem. OTOH if one is mainly interested in hand-wringing, then the question is pretty irrelevant.
Which problem? If you’re concerned about spending maybe that’s the right question to ask (I’m skeptical, a much more foundational question is why there are so many inmates). I’m still unclear on why that should be the focus of “the problem”.
Just so we’re clear, you think... housing and feeding and imprisoning and (I’m not gonna jump to conclusions about any other things you think are involved in keeping human beings in prison) should cost less than $15,000/year? If I’m understanding correctly, how do you think that’s achievable?
Well either it's achievable, or your minimum wage is so grossly low that you have much bigger problems than the costs of incarceration.
You have people (mostly) locked in a building and you feed them 3 times a day. The biggest costs should be food, electricity, and labour (guards). Economies of scale bring the per-prisoner cost all the way down.
This is one of the most disturbing things I’ve read in a long time.
> Well either it's achievable, or your minimum wage is so grossly low that you have much bigger problems than the costs of incarceration.
This is pretty widely recognized as the case for anyone not ideologically predisposed to reject the basic arithmetic involved.
> You have people (mostly) locked in a building and you feed them 3 times a day. The biggest costs should be food, electricity, and labour (guards).
Even by the actual reality of prison standards, that’s abusive. What about medical and mental health costs? What about even meager efforts of rehabilitation? Are the guards actual professionals trained to keep the inmates safe (from one another, other guards)?
> Economies of scale bring the per-prisoner cost all the way down.
This is bonkers!!! Why are we talking about economies of scale at all? Our goal should be to eliminate the need to house people in bondage against their will, not to reap the economic benefits of increasing their numbers.
>You have people (mostly) locked in a building and you feed them 3 times a day. The biggest costs should be food, electricity, and labour (guards).
don't forget housing, which makes up 40% of the CPI. You're also vastly underestimating the cost of labor. One article[1] cites the current inmate-to-staff ratio as 4.4-to-1, and that's considered high. I suspect that prison staff make far more than the minimum wage so I expect the staffing costs alone to cost more than the yearly minimum wage.
If housing is that high, it's because there's corruption somewhere. You put up a prison building and it should stand for 50 years with not that much maintenance. Housing should be the lowest cost of all.
> 4.4-to-1
That's absurd! Only the most hard to handle convicts would need such a ratio. Easily fixed by separating prisoners into different prisons based on the crime, likelihood of violence, medical conditions, etc.
These are all costs that could be easily reduced if the US wasn't so corrupt.
>If housing is that high, it's because there's corruption somewhere. You put up a prison building and it should stand for 50 years with not that much maintenance. Housing should be the lowest cost of all.
Building a prison isn't the same as building a bunch of suburban houses with white picket fences. It has to be secure from breakout attempts. Since it's a self-contained facility you also need to build the support structures (eg. dining hall, rec area, admin offices, etc.) as well.
>Easily fixed by separating prisoners into different prisons based on the crime, likelihood of violence, medical conditions, etc.
They already do that. Ever heard of maximum/medium/low security prisons?
>These are all costs that could be easily reduced if the US wasn't so corrupt.
Can you present some figures here, other than just blindly asserting that it must be corruption?
Burn it to the ground and start over? In a world designed to divide us, everyone agrees that US politics is broken, ans massive corruption is the reason why.
