Over 12,000 people were held in New York City jails last year, according to the Independent Budget Office, with the city spending more per inmate than any other state or city.
Mas, a renda é gasta por causa do prisioneiro, não fica com ele, e sim se perde na burocracia.
City’s Annual Cost Per Inmate Is $168,000, Study Finds
By MARC SANTORA
The New York Times: August 23, 2013
New York City is an expensive place to live for just about everyone, including prisoners.
The city paid $167,731 to feed, house and guard each inmate last year,according to a study the Independent Budget Office released this week.
“It is troubling in both human terms and financial terms,” Doug Turetsky, the chief of staff for the budget office, said on Friday. With 12,287 inmates shuffling through city jails last year, he said, “it is a significant cost to the city.”
Mr. Turetsky added that he was not aware of any previous studies that broke down the cost per inmate in the jails, but there have been national studies.
And by nearly any measure, New York City spends more than every other state or city.
The Vera Institute of Justice released a study in 2012 that found the aggregate cost of prisons in 2010 in the 40 states that participated was $39 billion.
The annual average taxpayer cost in these states was $31,286 per inmate.
New York State was the most expensive, with an average cost of $60,000 per prison inmate.
The cost of incarcerating people in New York City’s jails is nearly three times as much.
Michael P. Jacobson, the director of the City University of New York Institute for State and Local Governance and a former city correction and probation commissioner, said part of the reason the city’s cost was so high was because it had a richly staffed system. “The inmate-to-staff ratio probably hovers around two prisoners for every guard,” he said.
The budget office said 83 percent of the expense per prisoner came from wages, benefits for staff and pension costs.
Mr. Jacobson noted the success in bringing down the city’s jail population — from a peak of about 23,000 in 1993 to about 12,000 people today — but said the fixed costs were not likely to go down soon.
Still, he said, there were things that could be done to save money, like reducing the amount of time people sat in jail awaiting trial. Some 76 percent of the inmates in the city were waiting for their cases to be disposed, according to the budget office.
The wait times have grown even as the number of felonies committed in the city has declined.
Since 2002, the time spent waiting for cases to be disposed of has gone to 95 days, from 76 days, Mr. Jacobson said.
The delays were worst in the Bronx, but Mr. Jacobson said the trend could be seen across the city.
“On paper you would think that with a lot less work, these things should be blowing through the system and they are not,” he said. “If you have more time to do something, you will take more time.”
Only 7 percent of inmates are women, according to the budget office report.
They are also more likely to be minorities: 57 percent are black, 33 percent Hispanic, 7 percent white and 1 percent Asian.
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