The anti-incarceration crowd has had a surprising amount of success in recent years getting some people of generally conservative leanings to support their efforts. The pitch has been that reducing prison populations will cut government spending, and there are few things more musical to the conservative ear than cutting government spending. A funny thing happened on the way to reality.
Robin Respaut has this article for Reuters:
Robin Respaut has this article for Reuters:
In 2012, under court order to reduce prison overcrowding, California announced an ambitious criminal justice reform plan that promised not only to meet the court mandate but also to improve criminal sentencing and "save billions of dollars."
Now, three years after implementing the changes, California has reduced its prison population by some 30,000 inmates, and the state is in the vanguard of a prison reform movement spreading across the country, with support from both the right and the left.
But the promise of savings - a chief goal of prison reform nationwide - has not been realized. Instead, costs have risen.
The price tag for housing, feeding and caring for a prisoner in California has climbed to almost $64,000 annually, up from $49,000 five years ago. Per prisoner, the state spends more than three times the amount it did 20 years ago when the population was a similar size.
This fiscal year, despite the recent decline in inmate numbers, California's corrections budget is one of the largest ever at $10.1 billion.
The state also spends an additional $1 billion annually outside the corrections budget to help counties implement sentencing alternatives and handle higher numbers of offenders serving time in local jails. Another $2.2 billion of state money is slated for county jail construction.
The cost per prisoner has swelled for a range of reasons. Some money-saving moves haven't happened, including shuttering the state's most dilapidated facility and ending out-of-state private prison contracts. Additionally, court rulings have required the state to spend billions improving medical care.
The biggest driver of higher costs, however, has been personnel. The state budgets for about the same number of positions as it did five years ago, when the state system housed nearly 30,000 more inmates.
"Their numbers go up, not down. There is no way that could be justified," state Sen. Jim Nielsen (R-Gerber). "It was a deceit and a fraud to everybody that we were going to save money in corrections. We have not."
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