The cost of not imprisoning
The New York Times in an editorial today called for society to go easy on criminals because it costs so much to imprison them: “With the nation’s incarcerated population at 2.1 million and growing — and corrections costs topping $60 billion a year — states are rightly looking for ways to keep people from coming back to prison once they get out.”
Well, not really. According to my calculations, for every $1 we spend on prisons, we save $3 on crime.
On June 30, 1995, the U.S. had 1,104,074 inmates.
On June 30, 2006, there were 2,245,189 inmates.
That’s an extra 100,000 inmates a year and after 11 years, that’s twice as many inmates. If we had kept the incarceration rate the same, we would cut the costs in half and saved $30 billion.
But the increased incacerations coincided with a decrease in crime, according to the crime statistics.
In 1995, there were 21,610 homicides, 97,470 forcible rapes, and 580,510 robberies.
In 2006, there were 17,034 homicides, 92,455 forcible rapes and 447,403 robberies.
We traded 100,000 inmates a year for 4,000 fewer homicides, 5,000 fewer rapes and 125,000 fewer robberies a year.
Seems like a bargain to me.
And it is.
In 1998, the National Center for Policy Analysis put the price of crime in 1998 at $450 billion — including $424 billion for violent crime.
By 2006, the violent crime rate fell by 19.8% from the 1998 figures. The figures are here.
19.8% of $424 billion is just under $84 billion.
Let us review: We doubled the cost prisons, an increase of $30 billion. But we cut the cost of crime by $84 billion.
And really the $30 billion increase in cost covered 1995 to 2006 and was not adjusted for inflation — while the benefits were for a shorter period of time.
$3 saved for every $1 spent? Easily. Provable.
The New York Times is here.
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