Incarceration Inflation

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 13:03:00 GMT

The Washington Post and New York Times have articles on the results of a report issued by the Pew Center on the States, which found a Record-High Ratio of Americans in Prison, approximately 1 in 100 U.S. Adults Behind Bars. You can find a copy of the report here. That is extraordinary, especially when you consider that the US puts more people behind bars both in absolute (~2.3 million persons) and percentage (~1% of its population) numbers -- even more than China.

As both articles point out, the cost of this retribution policy has caught up with the federal and state governments, with state governments spending on average approximately 7% of their budgets on corrections, or cumulatively spending nearly $50 billion per year. That figure does not include the federal government's expenditures. All of that money comes from taxpayers' pockets. And that's just the economic costs; that doesn't even include the social costs of a perceived racially unjust system (see the figures comparing incarceration rates among various races in the articles).

Have all those promises by politicians of being "tough on crime" (i.e., increasing incarceration sentences) really paid off? Is incarceration really the most (cost-/socially-)effective way of punishing people? No one disputes that violent offenders should be kept behind bars. However, it seems that putting non-violent offenders behind bars for extended periods of time not only punishes the offender, but also the community in terms of taxpayer dollars that could be spent on arguably better pursuits like education and healthcare.

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Incarceration Inflation