19 ms·

NYC Spent Half a Million Dollars per Inmate in 2020, Report Says

124 points by undefined1 6y ago

mrbadideas 6y ago
They would probably be better off just giving the inmates 250k a pop and asking them to stay out of trouble.
- nashalo_nighly 6y ago
  Ever heard about the cobra effect?
  - rektide 6y ago
    I had. British India payed people to hunt & turn in Cobras & people of course started breeding Cobras[1] to collect money on them. None the less, it sucks a lot that society is basically punching itself in the face to punish & scar people. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect
    - rsj_hn 6y ago
      Society is spending a lot of money (far too much money) to keep dangerous people outside of society. That New York can't do this competently or cost-effectively does not mean that society would be better off if these people were put back on the street. 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.
      - torgian 6y ago
        There's a sci-fi novel I read recently that puts criminals on islands that are inaccessible by any means other than air. The worst sentences are sent there for life in exile, to fend for themselves. Other lesser crimes are kept in your normal prison.
      - goldcd 6y ago
        My take is that a lot of the people jailed, aren't that dangerous. 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).
      - asymptosis 6y ago
        > keep dangerous people outside of society 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.
- LouisSayers 6y ago
  It'd certainly be a good experiment
- undefined1 6y ago
  Andrew Yang made a related point about the $1k/month Freedom Dividend (UBI). if you're in prison, you don't get it. more incentive to stay out and easier given the guaranteed income of at least $1k/mo.
  - jMyles 6y ago
    I don't recall Yang making that specific point; I'm interested in a link if you have one handy. 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.
    - conro1108 6y ago
      Does it really incentivize the state to incarcerate more people? Surely it costs more than 1k/month to keep someone in prison even in more cost-efficient locales.
      - mushbino 6y ago
        Honestly, it depends on where the added up $1k/month is going.
      - jMyles 6y ago
        The state obviously already has incentives to create pools of extremely cheap labor. Saving $1,000 is not much extra I'll grant, but it's still an additional incentive in the wrong direction.
    - TheRealSteel 6y ago
      The whole point of the article is they were spending ~42,000$ per month per inmate. If they were instead spending 1,000$ per month per person, they could afford to be paying that to ten times as many people and still be spending a quarter of what they are now. 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.
- pxeboot 6y ago
  > They would probably be better off just giving the inmates 250k a pop and asking them to stay out of trouble. Wouldn't that just encourage more people to commit crimes so they could get a large check themselves?
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > They would probably be better off just giving the inmates 250k a pop and asking them to stay out of trouble. 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-to-commit-crime/ https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/should-we-pay-people-not-...
- fctorial 6y ago
  So you want to reward criminals for crimes.
mxcrossb 6y ago
It’s a shame the article doesn’t offer any hints as to why. I’m sure that we can point the finger at lobbyists and grift, but a big spike in 2020 probably is COVID related?
- potiuper 6y ago
  https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2438533/Rikers-Island-NYC-inmate-costs-sending-child-Ivy-League-college.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2438533/Rikers-Isla...
abhinai 6y ago
That kind of money is hard to spend per person unless we have institutionalized corruption somewhere in there. How do we begin to tackle this problem?
- hayst4ck 6y ago
  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. https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2020/03/072-DOC.pdf 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 After spending a while with wikipedia going through citations and some other things I arrived at: https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/nyc-department-of-correction/ https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/nyc-department-of-correc... 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 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-benefits.page 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.
  - fallingknife 6y ago
    They are paying pensions for 13.5K people, but only have 10K employees?
conchy 6y ago
they should just enroll inmates with room and board at Harvard ... it is apparently cheaper than jail.
aaomidi 6y ago
Imagine if this money was used to rehabilitate. Or to remove the conditions that lead to crime. Now you see what abolish prisons and police is.
- BuyMyBitcoins 6y ago
  > “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”.
  - novok 6y ago
    A lot of police work is not security work. That is the fundamental disconnect. People tend to want basic security protections. Do they really care if someone is secretly taking drugs if it doesn't lead to security threatening behaviors? Only a very small moralizing and authoritarian few.
- StanislavPetrov 6y ago
  Every reasonable person understands the need to reform the entire "justice system", from the police officer to the prosecutor's office to the legislature, but its not useful to ignore reality and pretend we live in a fantasy world where there aren't murderers, rapists and child molesters roaming around. A country of hundreds of millions of people is never going to be a utopian place without the need for laws, people who enforce the laws or places to put people who break the laws. Those who say we should abolish prisons and/or police either don't really mean "abolish", or aren't serious people with a grasp of objective reality. Those in the former category should drop the "abolish" rhetoric and say what they mean (whether that's reform, restructure, downsize). Those in the latter category are not mentally fit to be included in the debate.
  - danielheath 6y ago
    What category is "What we have now manages to be even worse than just letting the murderers, rapists and child molesters run free"?
systematical 6y ago
Think of all the UBI that money could've provided.
- pitaj 6y ago
  NYC has less than 8000 inmates. Which means less than $4B total. Split that across the NYC population of 8+ million, that's about $500 a year per resident.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - Tostino 6y ago
    Way too much for that number of inmates, insane.
fitblipper 6y ago
We need to demand a publicly accessible audit. The fact prisons don't even have to accurately report the number of inmate deaths they have to anyone with decision making power highlights how crazy the situation currently is. 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.
- aeternum 6y ago
  Wouldn't an audit just increase costs even more? It usually goes like: let's audit the cost, then let's create a committee to explore why the audit we just did cost so much.
  - param 6y ago
    Trust in government ops is valuable for success of democracy
    - aeternum 6y ago
      Sure, but for many people, audits do not build much trust.
  - Raidion 6y ago
    I mean, short term yes, but long term no. For half a million bucks an inmate, you have a lot of room to recover some money. 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.
- sershe 6y ago
  Are the prisons in the article private prisons? I cannot find a definite answer, but it doesn't look like it. If anything, it might be good to outsource these to private businesses to get costs under control from $500K/inmate.
hayst4ck 6y ago
I think this report is where the information comes from (specifically the mouse over on the second graph): https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/nyc-department-of-correction/ 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?
- function_seven 6y ago
  > 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: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/10/10/spoons-shovels/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/10/10/spoons-shovels/
  - hayst4ck 6y ago
    For what it's worth I agree, but I would personally have a hard time firing 1000 people, throwing a wrench in their lives. Especially during a pandemic and especially with poor social programs. 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.
    - 6y ago
aaron695 6y ago
> The city is spending more on inmates despite a drop in the number of incarcerations during the pandemic, the report said Isn't this going to cause the price per inmate to go up?
jMyles 6y ago
One of the chief takeaways of the 19th century (not just in the United States, but around the world) seems to be lost on us today: slavery is expensive. 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.

124 points by undefined1 6y ago

mrbadideas 6y ago

They would probably be better off just giving the inmates 250k a pop and asking them to stay out of trouble.

nashalo_nighly 6y ago
Ever heard about the cobra effect?
- rektide 6y ago
  I had. British India payed people to hunt & turn in Cobras & people of course started breeding Cobras[1] to collect money on them. None the less, it sucks a lot that society is basically punching itself in the face to punish & scar people. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect
  - rsj_hn 6y ago
    Society is spending a lot of money (far too much money) to keep dangerous people outside of society. That New York can't do this competently or cost-effectively does not mean that society would be better off if these people were put back on the street. 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.
    - torgian 6y ago
      There's a sci-fi novel I read recently that puts criminals on islands that are inaccessible by any means other than air. The worst sentences are sent there for life in exile, to fend for themselves. Other lesser crimes are kept in your normal prison.
    - goldcd 6y ago
      My take is that a lot of the people jailed, aren't that dangerous. 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).
    - asymptosis 6y ago
      > keep dangerous people outside of society 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.
LouisSayers 6y ago
It'd certainly be a good experiment
undefined1 6y ago
Andrew Yang made a related point about the $1k/month Freedom Dividend (UBI). if you're in prison, you don't get it. more incentive to stay out and easier given the guaranteed income of at least $1k/mo.
- jMyles 6y ago
  I don't recall Yang making that specific point; I'm interested in a link if you have one handy. 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.
  - conro1108 6y ago
    Does it really incentivize the state to incarcerate more people? Surely it costs more than 1k/month to keep someone in prison even in more cost-efficient locales.
    - mushbino 6y ago
      Honestly, it depends on where the added up $1k/month is going.
    - jMyles 6y ago
      The state obviously already has incentives to create pools of extremely cheap labor. Saving $1,000 is not much extra I'll grant, but it's still an additional incentive in the wrong direction.
  - TheRealSteel 6y ago
    The whole point of the article is they were spending ~42,000$ per month per inmate. If they were instead spending 1,000$ per month per person, they could afford to be paying that to ten times as many people and still be spending a quarter of what they are now. 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.
pxeboot 6y ago
> They would probably be better off just giving the inmates 250k a pop and asking them to stay out of trouble. Wouldn't that just encourage more people to commit crimes so they could get a large check themselves?
dragonwriter 6y ago
> They would probably be better off just giving the inmates 250k a pop and asking them to stay out of trouble. 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-to-commit-crime/ https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/should-we-pay-people-not-...
fctorial 6y ago
So you want to reward criminals for crimes.

mxcrossb 6y ago

It’s a shame the article doesn’t offer any hints as to why. I’m sure that we can point the finger at lobbyists and grift, but a big spike in 2020 probably is COVID related?

potiuper 6y ago
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2438533/Rikers-Island-NYC-inmate-costs-sending-child-Ivy-League-college.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2438533/Rikers-Isla...

abhinai 6y ago

That kind of money is hard to spend per person unless we have institutionalized corruption somewhere in there. How do we begin to tackle this problem?

hayst4ck 6y ago
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. https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2020/03/072-DOC.pdf 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 After spending a while with wikipedia going through citations and some other things I arrived at: https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/nyc-department-of-correction/ https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/nyc-department-of-correc... 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 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-benefits.page 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.
- fallingknife 6y ago
  They are paying pensions for 13.5K people, but only have 10K employees?

conchy 6y ago

they should just enroll inmates with room and board at Harvard ... it is apparently cheaper than jail.

aaomidi 6y ago

Imagine if this money was used to rehabilitate. Or to remove the conditions that lead to crime. Now you see what abolish prisons and police is.

BuyMyBitcoins 6y ago
> “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”.
- novok 6y ago
  A lot of police work is not security work. That is the fundamental disconnect. People tend to want basic security protections. Do they really care if someone is secretly taking drugs if it doesn't lead to security threatening behaviors? Only a very small moralizing and authoritarian few.
StanislavPetrov 6y ago
Every reasonable person understands the need to reform the entire "justice system", from the police officer to the prosecutor's office to the legislature, but its not useful to ignore reality and pretend we live in a fantasy world where there aren't murderers, rapists and child molesters roaming around. A country of hundreds of millions of people is never going to be a utopian place without the need for laws, people who enforce the laws or places to put people who break the laws. Those who say we should abolish prisons and/or police either don't really mean "abolish", or aren't serious people with a grasp of objective reality. Those in the former category should drop the "abolish" rhetoric and say what they mean (whether that's reform, restructure, downsize). Those in the latter category are not mentally fit to be included in the debate.
- danielheath 6y ago
  What category is "What we have now manages to be even worse than just letting the murderers, rapists and child molesters run free"?

systematical 6y ago

Think of all the UBI that money could've provided.

pitaj 6y ago
NYC has less than 8000 inmates. Which means less than $4B total. Split that across the NYC population of 8+ million, that's about $500 a year per resident.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Tostino 6y ago
  Way too much for that number of inmates, insane.

fitblipper 6y ago

We need to demand a publicly accessible audit. The fact prisons don't even have to accurately report the number of inmate deaths they have to anyone with decision making power highlights how crazy the situation currently is. 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.

aeternum 6y ago
Wouldn't an audit just increase costs even more? It usually goes like: let's audit the cost, then let's create a committee to explore why the audit we just did cost so much.
- param 6y ago
  Trust in government ops is valuable for success of democracy
  - aeternum 6y ago
    Sure, but for many people, audits do not build much trust.
- Raidion 6y ago
  I mean, short term yes, but long term no. For half a million bucks an inmate, you have a lot of room to recover some money. 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.
sershe 6y ago
Are the prisons in the article private prisons? I cannot find a definite answer, but it doesn't look like it. If anything, it might be good to outsource these to private businesses to get costs under control from $500K/inmate.

hayst4ck 6y ago

I think this report is where the information comes from (specifically the mouse over on the second graph): https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/nyc-department-of-correction/ 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?

function_seven 6y ago
> 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: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/10/10/spoons-shovels/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/10/10/spoons-shovels/
- hayst4ck 6y ago
  For what it's worth I agree, but I would personally have a hard time firing 1000 people, throwing a wrench in their lives. Especially during a pandemic and especially with poor social programs. 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.
  - 6y ago

aaron695 6y ago

> The city is spending more on inmates despite a drop in the number of incarcerations during the pandemic, the report said Isn't this going to cause the price per inmate to go up?

jMyles 6y ago

One of the chief takeaways of the 19th century (not just in the United States, but around the world) seems to be lost on us today: slavery is expensive. 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.