At $75,560, Housing a Prisoner in California Now Costs More Than a Year at Harvard (latimes.com)

The cost of imprisoning each of California's 130,000 inmates is expected to reach a record $75,560 in the next year, the AP reported. From the article: That's enough to cover the annual cost of attending Harvard University and still have plenty left over for pizza and beer Gov. Jerry Brown's spending plan for the fiscal year that starts July 1 includes a record $11.4 billion for the corrections department while also predicting that there will be 11,500 fewer inmates in four years (alternative source) because voters in November approved earlier releases for many inmates. 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.

Comments

we'll pay for prison

[Anonymous Coward]

We'll pay to put people in prison, yet we won't pay to educate people. Maybe it's just me, but perhaps, just perhaps this nation has its priorities backwards.

Re:we'll pay for prison

[Anonymous Coward]

Are they suggesting that Harvard students should be housed in California prisons?

Re:we'll pay for prison

[__aaclcg7560]

Getting tough is easier than getting smart when it comes to getting votes.

Re:we'll pay for prison

[Hognoxious]

Then they'd refer to it as the slahmah.

Re:we'll pay for prison

[wisnoskij]

It is all about priorities. If you don't pay to put people in prison, you get a pile of dead people. If you don't pay to send people to university, the person just enters the job marker earlier and in general does has better economic statistics.

Re:we'll pay for prison

[Anonymous Coward]

It also gets you sweet lobbying kickbacks from the private prison system. A win-win, except for the people getting fucked over by said system, the taxpayers funding the whole thing, and society in general when people come out more messed up than when they went in.

Re:we'll pay for prison

[__aaclcg7560]

Are they suggesting that Harvard students should be housed in California prisons?

That wouldn't be a bad idea. A 1978 documentary, Scared Straight!, had a group of juvenile delinquents meet harden convicts who scared the crap out of them to convince that a life of crime doesn't pay. Such an experience for the graduating class of Harvard might convince future Wall Street traders and politicians to be more ethical in their dealings.

Re:we'll pay for prison

[cheesybagel]

A lot of people in US jails are in for drug related offenses. The US has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world and there is no excuse for that.

Re:we'll pay for prison

[Anonymous Coward]

Professionally trained killers who are willing to give up their lives to protect you from the rest of the world.

The way things have gone lately, it's more like the rest of the world needs protected from our professional trained killers. Some perspective for you. Then we wonder why the rest of the world hates the US? Maybe if we stopped sending troops all over the fucking place to kill people who never did a damn thing to anyone in the US.

Every bomb we drop somewhere in the world..another angry terrorist is created.

Tell me, are we actually any safer than we were 25 years ago?
We're not? What do you mean all of those billions of dollars spent in Afghanistan and Iraq accomplished nothing? Nevermind the the thousands of American soldiers who died for pretty much nothing. They weren't defending our freedom, they were defending special interests.

Captcha: hoodwinked

Re:we'll pay for prison

[Anonymous Coward]

A 1978 documentary, href="http://amzn.to/2sAK1ft">Scared Straight!, had a group of juvenile delinquents meet harden convicts who scared the crap out of them to convince that a life of crime doesn't pay. Such an experience for the graduating class of Harvard might convince future Wall Street traders and politicians to be more ethical in their dealings.

Why? They are not at any measurable risk of going to prison - prison is for the poor or middle class.

Re:we'll pay for prison

[Shimbo]

Are they suggesting that Harvard students should be housed in California prisons?

That wouldn't be a bad idea. A 1978 documentary, Scared Straight!, had a group of juvenile delinquents meet harden convicts who scared the crap out of them to convince that a life of crime doesn't pay.

Unfortunately "Scared Straight!" is a textbook case of an idea that sounds good in theory and makes good TV but when you do do proper controlled trials you discover that it is worse than useless: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...

Re:we'll pay for prison

[sunderland56]

The US does pay for educating people through secondary school.

Well over half of prison inmates did not successfully compete their free, government-funded education.

Re: we'll pay for prison

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. But the customer is us. Base fees on recidivism.

Re:we'll pay for prison

[arth1]

What other metric would you use to pay for those prisons? Customer satisfaction?

How about recidivism rates? Pay a bonus for every prisoner that's released from a prison, every year until they are arrested again or die, whichever comes first.
That would add an incentive for rehabilitation.

Re:we'll pay for prison

[JesseMcDonald]

American style capitalism says everything gets cheaper, better, more efficient through privatization. ... Except when it doesn't.

Aside from the potential for competition, that assumes a that the buyers are somewhat sensitive to changes in price. Under normal circumstances that would be a safe assumption, but when the buyer is the government, and spending other people's money, there is very little price sensitivity on the buyer's side to keep prices in check. The seller, of course, is going to charge whatever they can get away with, and the government has no real incentive to bargain or look for cheaper solutions. The inevitable outcome is obvious, and not in any sense a failing of capitalism.

Re:we'll pay for prison

[dgatwood]

Or just make them get law degrees. Harvard has nearly a 0% recidivism rate; people who go to Harvard almost never go back. :-)

Re:we'll pay for prison

[TimothyHollins]

So...Rob a Bank, get a free education?

In fall 2016, some 20.5 million students are expected to attend American colleges and universities

This is one trillion five hundred billion dollars.

Fuck You.

I don't want to interrupt your delightful exposition, but as far as I can tell the proposal for tax-funded college doesn't necessarily require that we send everyone to Harvard.

In fact, if I may be so bold, I would tentatively suggest that it could be a tad tricky to fit 20.5 million students into Harvard, as it's only 85 ha (344 km^2) in size.
Looking into it, even if we assume that we can squeeze 4 students in per square meter (a proposal that is sure to deflate any hopes of reducing the number of Title IX charges this year), we're still 19.12 million students short!
We would need to stack our students 15 stories high, and that doesn't even take into account how we're gonna keep them standing still the entire semester, cause with entropy this thing will rapidly become un-manageable, and good luck keeping your customer satisfaction ratings up then! You can already expect a solid one-star ratings drop from the students the staff will have to park their cars on.

However, I'm sure you have already considered this before enlightening us all with your sparkling wit. So, with great anticipation and rock-hard nipples, I await your solution.

Thank you.

Re:we'll pay for prison

[queazocotal]

If more harvard students went to prison, on the other hand, you can guarantee treatment of prisoners would improve.

Re:we'll pay for prison

[rogoshen1]

well, they'd get a taste of the diversity that the school constantly crows about.

Re:we'll pay for prison

[queazocotal]

Or pleading up from actually being innocent.

Re:we'll pay for prison

[Cipheron]

Because the incentive is to keep the prison full, which costs more taxpayers money, and some companies involved have been found to pay kickbacks to judges who hand out harsh sentences.

Re:we'll pay for prison

[gweihir]

I don't think so. Unless they are massively stupid, Wall Street traders and politicians do not get sent to prison.

Re: we'll pay for prison

[ShanghaiBill]

How is Socialist Venezuela doing these days?

Free markets work better than socialism for distributing groceries.

Monopsony markets do NOT work better than socialism for running prisons.

Back in the 1980s, there was a big push for privatized prisons. I was a supporter, because it seemed like a good idea to use the profit motive to drive reform. But it has NOT worked, and private prisons have a dismal record. Since I believe in evidence based reasoning, I no longer support private prisons. They were a mistake.

Re:we'll pay for prison

[ooloorie]

We'll pay to put people in prison, yet we won't pay to educate people. Maybe it's just me, but perhaps, just perhaps this nation has its priorities backwards.

No, it's not just you: plenty of people hold such stupid beliefs and make such trite statements.

Fact is that the US spends massively on education. Our per pupil spending is among the highest in the world. Yet, there is little relationship between spending and student performance/outcomes.

Spending insane amounts of money on incarceration in California doesn't mean that education spending should be raised, it means that prisoners should be incarcerated more cheaply.

Re:we'll pay for prison

[SuricouRaven]

An excess of them. The US military is vastly bloated - it's simply huge, and expensive. The US spends three times more than Russia and China combined. It's certainly very nice to have enough firepower to take on the entire world at once, but is it really the best use of taxpayer money? If the military budget were cut in half it would instantly eliminate the spending deceit and with a lot left over, and the US would still be a military superpower.

Re:we'll pay for prison

[ooloorie]

Well, the US already spends more than $11000 on average per elementary school student, and more than $12000 on average per secondary school student, more than all but a handful of other nations. The US also has one of the largest percentage of college/university educated adults in the world. US teachers are paid significantly more than OECD average. Some of the students on which we spend the most (inner cities, native Americans) have some of the worst outcomes.

Re:we'll pay for prison

[Gilgaron]

I think the military is currently used as a 'right-wing friendly' make-work program. You have the poor employed and trained as soldiers, the middle class as scientists and engineers to make the equipment, and the upper class running the industrial complex. Maybe a CCC style program could replace it but I'm not sure that simply cutting the military budget in half would necessarily solve more problems than it would cause with how things stand.

Huh?

[DontBeAMoran]

That's enough to cover the annual cost of attending Harvard University and still have plenty left over for pizza and beer Gov.

What's beer gov?

Re:Huh?

[HornWumpus]

It was your first election cycle?

There hasn't been a major party candidate worth voting for in my lifetime. It's always vote against the worst one.

Most of the money spent at college

[rsilvergun]

goes to education. Most of the money spent at a private prison goes to the people running the prison. Our priorities are just fine, provided you run a private prison and/or own stock in one.

Re:Most of the money spent at college

[kevmeister]

Actually, as the article states, most of the money goes to prison guards and health care.

What was missed is that the prison guards union is generally considered to be the most powerful political spender in the state. The get what they ask for very routinely. Their pay increases have regularly run way ahead of inflation. Clearly money well spent!

Re:Most of the money spent at college

[ShanghaiBill]

The prison guard unions have funded ballot initiatives to lengthen sentences and send more people to prison. So it isn't just a matter of how much they are paid, but how many of them we need. California has way too many people in prison, and way too many prison guards.

Also, the biggest problem with guard compensation is not salaries but pensions. Pensions are based on "final year salary" so what they do is cram an extra thousand hours of overtime into their last year, wildly inflating their pay, and guaranteeing themselves an obscenely generous pension for the next 40 years (they can retire at age 50). Most of them spend longer collecting a pension than they spent collecting a salary.

Re:If only all of us would stop committing felonie

[PoopJuggler]

If all of us would stop electing officials who don't mind paying $1.5 trillion for F35s when maybe we could make college free for everyone.

Expected

[mesterha]

While we pay too much to keep people in prison. (And spiteful people seem to want to keep them there.) The changes in California are not unreasonable. They show a 6% yearly increase. Given that the prison population is shrinking, it's not surprising that the fixed costs that are built into the system are going to give a number that is higher than inflation, which is about 2% over that timespan.

We're doing it wrong news at 11

[acrimonious howard]

The solution has already been demonstrated very well, it's called restorative justice.

Re:We're doing it wrong news at 11

[by (1706743)]

Yeah, but this might happen...

Staff forgot to lock up inmates

On Friday night, staff at Norrtalje prison forgot to lock up six inmates in their cells, three of whom are convicted murderers.

The inmates took their chance by baking chocolate cake and watching TV.

"It was one of the most enjoyable evenings we've had in a long time," said one of the inmates.

Major impact actually from MJ and MMJ

[WillAffleckUW]

When I found out the King County budget was exploding, it turned out a lot of that was for enforcement, trials, juries, and prison for people who were using MJ.

We slashed our budget by making MJ arrests the lowest enforcement priority in Seattle and Tacoma.

Then we legalized MJ and MMJ statewide.

California will soon do this as well.

It's a "crime" that is almost entirely enforced on black and brown folks even though most users and dealers are actually white.

And then they have prison records, so they can't work.

By pardoning everyone and removing these "convictions" from their records, we increase the GDP and get more people working and paying taxes.

Same for California. Same for Canada.

Re:Major impact actually from MJ and MMJ

[Anonymous Coward]

Then we legalized MJ and MMJ statewide.

Then we legalized Michael Jordan and Mrs. Michael Jordan statewide? They shouldn't have been outlawed in the first place.

Prison guards make around $150k a year in Calif.

[Spy Handler]

Prison guards' Union, for some weird reason, wields great power in California state legislature and the politicians generally just give them whatever they want.

Re:If only all of us would stop committing felonie

[OrangeTide]

College educated people had to be hired to design the F-35. So it's not a total waste. Arms industry represents about 2% of the nation's GDP and about 10% of the US's manufacturing output.

Obviously being the world leader in death and destruction doesn't sit well with some of us. But it is extremely profitable.

Re:No, it's $3774 per month

[Spy Handler]

That's nice. How about looking at some real world data:

http://gawker.com/5797381/spoi...

"One sergeant with a base salary of $81,683 collected $114,334 in overtime and $8,648 in bonuses last year, and he's not even the highest paid."

$81k base + $114k overtime + $8k bonus = $203k

Oh and not every prison guard lives in Bay area.

Bad Comparison

[SoulMaster]

This comparison is stupid.

Contrary to popular belief: Harvard's true tuition is based on your family's income/assets, it's not fixed like standard schools. I get that the "list price" is $69K, but that's not the "cost" if your family isn't earning ~$250K/year. Harvard has "need-based" scholarship programs that can reduce the true cost to zero or near zero. The point is, if your academics can get you into Harvard College, they don't want you to worry about the price, they want you to attend. Oh, and they disallow student loans. https://college.harvard.edu/fi...

From the Harvard site (linked): "In fact, approximately 70 percent of our students receive some form of aid, and about 60 percent receive need–based scholarships and pay an average of $12,000 per year. Twenty percent of parents pay nothing. No loans required."

Here's a calculator: https://college.harvard.edu/fi...

In other words, the "genius" who made this comparison isn't Harvard material - and is trying to say "it's expensive to house our inmates" by assuming Harvard is expensive. The truth is, it's not.

If s/he had done some research, s/he could should have said "Cost of a Porsche Boxster S", or something else that is actually "expensive" instead of making the poor people think they've got no chance of affording Harvard if they can get in.

Sloppy journalism.

-SM

Go Crimson!

Re:Bad Comparison

[Patent Lover]

Perhaps California prisons need an endowment.

unpopular fix

[frovingslosh]

I realize tat the snowflakes are going to call me a Trump fascist, but maybe it is time that these prisoners only get basic cable and not all of the premium channels.