NYC Spent Half a Million Dollars per Inmate in 2020, Report Says
bloomberg.com
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Federal prisons are starting the process of leaving private contracts which is great. We need to force all states to do the same. Personal freedom needs to be free from market pressures and money. In az there was recently an inmate management software update which was rushed for financial reasons. A whistleblower recently revealed the software is unable to handle certain laws causing people to stay imprisoned possibly 2x longer than the law requires.
Googling pulls up a stat that 4000 people are incarcerated in NYC. If you could spend 1.9 million dollars and reduce expenses for a year by 1%, that pays for itself in the first year. At that scale and cost, any efficiencies pay for themselves fairly quickly.
https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2...
This looks like a good place to start
Jail Operations: $1.1 billion
Operations -Rikers Security & Operations: $37.1 million
Operations -Infrastructure & Environmental Health: $41.1 million
Health and Programs: $48.7million
Operations -Hospital Prison Ward: $13.7 million
Administration -Academy & Training: $17.7 million
Administration -Management & Administration: $97.4 million
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.
On this website:
https://www.seethroughny.net/pensions/126507913
2019 DOC pensions results in: 13,619 Results Total: $582,352,875
Here we can see "fringe" benefits:
https://www1.nyc.gov/site/jointheboldest/officer/salary-bene...
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.
Life expectancies are pretty long these days and 20 years is not all that long.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_State_Common_Retireme...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Due to economies of scale, less than the minimum wage per annum.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/federal-eye/wp/2015/09/0...
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.
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?
> 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.
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 $$ cost is likely to be the most tractable approach.
Why is that a better question? What would your ideal $500k spend to incarcerate someone be?
> $$ 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.
Only because the people in cages are treated as budgets instead of human beings.
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.
> What do you think would be an appropriate per-inmate budget?
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.
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
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
Heck, I'd take that deal.
https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/nyc-department-of-correc...
It paints a very different picture than the headline as we have all read it.
One might interpret the headline as out of control spending. The break down of cost per inmate seems outrageous and supports that idea... but what really seems to have happened is a reduction of inmate population without a corresponding reduction in employees. I would guess things are most explained by not wanting to take away people's livelihoods and increase unemployment.
Is "prison population reduced by 50% while employees remain constant" anywhere near as outrageous of an interpretation?"
Should we fire 10% of the DOC workforce every year?
If the inmate population is declining by that amount, then absolutely yes we should. We didn't hire them in the first place to "give jobs" or "reduce unemployment". We (ostensibly!) hired them to guard prisoners.
When there are fewer prisoners to guard, you need fewer guards. It would be much cheaper to cover their education costs for a different line of work if you're worried about taking people's livelihoods away. (Which is a totally reasonable concern)
It reminds me of the quote about giving ditch diggers spoons instead of shovels to create more jobs:
When I look at this I am not outraged by the spending. I am outraged by the lack of federal social programs that directly burden the department of corrections with things like health care and retirement. The federal government should be handling these and reaping the economies of scale benefits of doing so.
And I'm with you. I could never be the axe man. But then again I could also never be a prison guard, so there's that :)
Now you see what abolish prisons and police is.
I don’t want to live in a society that has abolished police and prisons.
I don’t even know how people end up with this view - unless you want to shuffle around the definitions of “abolish”, “police”, and “prison”.
What if corrections costs are not due to malfeasance or inefficiency, but due to it being a jobs program for relatively unskilled labor? If we applied skilled labor to the problem, how would we deal with the displaced unskilled labor? What is the opportunity cost of training people for rehabilitating criminals rather than improving our professionals mental health/productivity or STEM training? Is the rehabilitation cost worth more than paying teachers more?
It doesn't take long living in San Francisco to have your window bashed in or bike stolen. What would you do with those people? What would you do with unrepentant murderers and rapists? What would you do for people who derive social standing through violence? Clearly police and prison is useful to society. Clearly it would be ideal to turn criminals into tax paying, law abiding citizens.
There is a cold blooded cost/benefit analysis that can be made. There is probably a rehabilitation cost that can be measured. If cost_of_rehabilitation > total_estimated_future_tax_revenues is it worth it? If we added several more factors to the equation, maybe good_will_cost, cost_of_incarceration, opportunity_cost, etc, I think everyone will agree there is a potential model that can be applied to the problem, even if it doesn't feel good to be so objective.
I don't think we have a recipe for what rehabilitation looks like. Is it ethical to perform "rehabilitation" experiments on prisoners? What is the plan for training and the labor cost increase for skilled labor? What is the plan for creating a rehabilitation program?
> Now you see what abolish prisons and police is.
This phrase is meant to be provocative and energize a certain set of ideals (specifically being anti-authority). It doesn't appeal to moderates at all. The fact NPR and every other news source had to break it down for begrudging acceptance really hurts it's message. The message is justice for all, and if police are above the law, then there is no justice. If the color of your skin puts you at a higher chance of persecution, then there is no justice. If the culture someone grows up in is too poor or disadvantaged to meet basic needs for money or respect, and crime is the only or easiest way to fulfill them, then there is no justice.
Our implementations of prison and police are poor. There is a very clear cultural problem. They need reform, not abolition. This phrase hinders reform because it's literal meaning is far from what it means when someone says it.
Not necessarily. Provocative statements can drive engagement by the extremes without costing you the moderates. This has worked really well for the right wing in the US, whose moderates flocked to a candidate who often offended them and worked against their stated priorities, rather than vote for a moderate candidate from the other party.
Moderation is good governance but often bad politics. It's boring, and people can't be enthusiastic about it.
The left and right are not symmetric with respect to that, and it's hard to tell whether "defund the police" is a slogan that usefully shifts the Overton window or merely demoralizes the center-left. It is certain, though, that it doesn't really matter what it does to the center-right: they are very unlikely to vote for even the most centrist candidate from the nominally left wing party.
So you could say that the fact that NPR has to explain it is more useful than more moderate measures that would get less airtime. It's nearly impossible to quantify that, but it shouldn't be dismissed out of hand, either.
The conditions are not good enough for those who are grossly irresponsible, or desire luxuries they can’t afford. That includes people wanting to live in expensive and desirable locations that don’t match their ability to generate income. But people aren’t entitled to every luxury they desire. I feel like this basic personal responsibility has been ignored in our recent political discourse.
Because a substantial portion of crimes aren’t desperate attempts at survival, I’m not convinced that abolishing prisons or police will do anything except expose the rest of us to a chaotic and unsafe life. If we want to explore that direction we have to vote to fund small contained experiments that we can expand if they work, without jumping straight to defunding or abolishing services that keep us safe.
As an aside - we may disagree about the effectiveness or level of safety nets, and that’s a fair conversation to hold on its own. However immigrants from humble beginnings regularly manage to make it here without resorting to criminality. I feel like it’s not the conditions at play, but other factors, such as individual choices and behaviors and culture.
What we have here is a system wherein cheap labor is provided to the war machine, but the accoutrements of the bondage are exorbitant, so these costs are spread across society. It's the economics of the fugitive slave laws all over again.
Isn't this going to cause the price per inmate to go up?
Split that across the NYC population of 8+ million, that's about $500 a year per resident.
None the less, it sucks a lot that society is basically punching itself in the face to punish & scar people.
A larger question is whether anyone can warehouse prisoners cost effectively. That's when you start thinking about exile, banishment to a remote island, or other mechanisms of expelling dangerous/undesirable people without actually locking them up in a small room for years. This latter point is indeed not necessary to protect society and seems to be unnecessarily costly. The problem is that no other society is likely to accept New York's criminal classes -- we have run out of Australias. In a world without Australias, another option might be to pay some other country to take them, revoking their US citizenship and preventing re-entry for a certain number of years equal to the time of their sentence (or permanently in the case of murder). That would be much cheaper than keeping them in prison, and I'm sure you could find a number of countries willing to take them for 10% of what New York spends per year, as many nations have a GDP per capita far less than 50K/year, and would even be able to furnish a decent quality of life for half that and keep the rest for themselves.
Other lesser crimes are kept in your normal prison.
Issues with Education, Mental Health, Crappy Families, Substance abuse etc all seem to wash up in the criminal justice system - like somebody being lazy with their exception handling.
If I had to guess why it's not working, it's that every cog in the system is doing the job they've been asked to do (police are arresting, prosecutors are sentencing, jailers are filling shiny jails etc). There's no single person responsible for the system, who's in a position to change it. You'd think a politician might try - but all opposing sides will take a pop at 'soft on crime' if they try. Mercy/Pragmatism doesn't play well.
Similar to those giant soviet factories - there's one way to do it, it's always been done this way and each worker will add a cog to keep those shitty tractors coming off the production line. Nobody will be rewarded for solving the problem.
Actually, maybe that's the answer - free-market rehabilitation. At sentencing put fulfilment of sentence out to tender - with cash payable on results. 50% up front, then 10% a year after release until they re-offend (or die).
This kind of assumption about prisoners is unhelpful. Not everyone who goes to jail is "dangerous". Laws are made based on the lowest common denominator, not universal demarcations between goodies vs baddies.
Ex-con here, got in trouble about a decade ago (non-violent crime) when I was in my early 30s. Did my year inside and didn't even get into any fights. Turns out most prisoners are actually fairly reasonable if you don't go causing trouble with them. Keep your eyes open and your mouth shut, that's all you have to do.
I kind of found prison beneficial, in that it gave me time to reflect on how I had been shooting myself in the foot, and what I should do to be a better person in future. And I haven't been in any trouble since leaving.
But was it the optimal way for me to learn the lessons I needed to learn? I'm not sure about the answer to that question, but I can tell you what would have been a really stupid idea: pack me off to some corrupt 3rd world country for a year without easy ways for friends and family to visit me and support my transition back out into the community after release.
It is a category error to call my statement helpful or unhelpful, since it's not my intention to help further any kind of agenda other than basic realism.
People, when they sit down in a bar, want some assurance that the person sitting next to them didn't get into a fight and smash a broken bottle into their neighbor's face. People taking their kids to school would like to know that their teacher didn't sleep with the kids. People sleeping in their homes at night would like to know that there isn't someone breaking and entering into their homes. People saving for their retirement would like to know that someone isn't running off with their pension. Someone running a business would like to know that there aren't burglars walking around that break into shops at night and steal their inventory. Everyone wants those who do this gone, gone from the group. Some may also want them punished, but I'm not being emotional here. Others fantasize about reforming people, when there is scant evidence that this is possible, but one way or another, society needs to purge itself of its criminal classes.
Note that not all of the above are "violent", but for society to work there needs to be cooperation, and for cooperation to work there needs to be trust. In order to maintain a steady state in which you can trust your neighbors well enough to be part of an advanced high-trust society, certain people who abuse that trust need to be removed from society, because not everyone is or can be trustworthy. In fact, it matters not at all who they are or why they did what they did. All that matters is their impact on social trust and their suitability for being part of the cooperating group. Hence my suggestion that we try to find some other group for them, rather than locking them up in a little room.
If you do not do that, you simply lose the high-trust society. Now there are men with shotguns guarding the entrance to every store. Bars around every window. And the whole society becomes a type of dysfunctional prison for everyone. Enormous costs are borne by everyone when we lose social trust, and it is the desire to avoid these costs that is the reason why we kick people out that we no longer trust to be peaceful, law abiding members of the group. There are many societies which don't have this trust, and very few of us would want to live there. There you often see the wealthy hiring their own private security and maintaining their own separate little bubble while everyone else is subject to the vagaries of a low-trust society. As the US becomes more "liberal" in attitudes, the same thing is happening here, except home prices effectively segregate into bubbles of high and low trust. Gated communities are becoming much more popular.
Those of us who still believe that a high trust society is possible in the US value being able to walk down the street without being assaulted, or that we don't need to live in a gated community with constant armed patrols, we don't want to program our cars to avoid low income areas. And this luxury should be afforded to everyone, not just those who can afford to self-segregate into high income bubbles. But in order have a high trust society, we have to expel a certain subset. It doesn't particularly matter if you don't like that this is a basic trade off.
> Not everyone who goes to jail is "dangerous"
There is a huge focus on violence, as if it's OK to say, burn down buildings, loot pension funds, or break into homes as long as no one gets hurt physically. The arsonist or conman need to be removed from a cooperating society just as much as the man who assaults people in bars. A lot more than a lack of violence is required in order for cooperation to be possible. Before deciding whether theft should be grounds for removal from society, go to a place where theft is very common and see how you enjoy living there. Look at the enormous security costs that must be paid by everyone. Look at the suspicious treatment everyone receives. Then decide whether removing people who serially steal is a worthwhile goal.
Now in terms of whether our laws have this right, that's a question for a debate on judicial reform, not prison reform. If you want to make the case that a certain type of crime doesn't warrant a prison sentence, that's fine by me, but IMO this is off-topic.
You predicated everything you said on the dangerousness of criminals. Now it seems like you're backpedalling.
Overall, your response shows a tendency towards hyperbole. How to manage crime is a complicated topic; you seem prone to catastrophising the worst, and this catastrophising leads to unrealistic conclusions like "let's pack them all away and make them a problem for some other country."
There are lots of things we would like to trust about people around us. Eg, we would like to trust that we can make mistakes in life and that there is a way to come back from those mistakes.
This is completely obvious to most people. Others talk about "peaceful protests" when a city is burned to the ground and think there is some magical line that allows one to destroy a person's home and livelihood but as long as no one is punched, then it's OK and no prison time is needed.
But as far as NYC goes: yes, 500k is a lot. NY taxpayers should look into why it costs so much.
For example, imagine if data shows the best way to rehabilitate any criminal is to give them 1mil. Imagine the uproar from the families of murder or rape victims at the policy. We just wouldn't accept it.
It seems awful to me to give the state an even greater incentive to enslave people, and also deeply inequitable to incarcerated folks, given that so few even had a trial.
Plus with the added bonus of (hopefully) less crime.
I'm not claiming those numbers are accurate, but as presented, it's a saving to keep people out of jail, not a cost.
Besides, right now there's obviously a financial incentive to keep people out of jail, yet here we are, with the US having the highest portion of their population in jail of any country in the world. The financial incentive to the state obviously isn't working now.
Wouldn't that just encourage more people to commit crimes so they could get a large check themselves?
Doing this preemptively in at-risk-of-offense groups has been a serious thing. [0]
Specifically targeting convicted offenders is problematic since it creates an incentive to commit a first offense to qualify.
[0] https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/should-we-pay-people-not-...