{"id":1866,"date":"2014-05-23T11:38:34","date_gmt":"2014-05-23T15:38:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/?p=1866"},"modified":"2019-03-26T15:04:41","modified_gmt":"2019-03-26T19:04:41","slug":"price-of-incarceration","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/2014\/05\/23\/price-of-incarceration\/","title":{"rendered":"Paying the price of mass incarceration"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>While working on an upcoming report, I set out to find the answer to a relatively straightforward question: <b>What is the direct fiscal cost of incarceration in the United States?<\/b><\/p>\n<p>The answer, it turns out, was not readily available. So I started to pull some sources. Here&#8217;s what I found for correctional expenses in 2010:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.bjs.gov\/content\/pub\/pdf\/scefy8210.pdf\">States<\/a> spent $48.5 billion<\/li>\n<li>The federal <a href=\"https:\/\/www.hsdl.org\/?view&#038;did=739496\">Bureau of Prisons<\/a> spent $6.2 billion<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.bjs.gov\/content\/pub\/pdf\/lgcefy0511.pdf\">Local governments<\/a> spent $27.7 billion.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>This means that <b>the U.S.&#8217;s incarceration tab in 2010 came out to a whopping $82.4 <i>billion<\/i><\/b>.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s a lot of money, but it&#8217;s also a significant underestimate for two important reasons:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>This figure does not include expenses related to law enforcement, courts, or other pieces of the <a href=\"\/reports\/pie.html\">mass incarceration pie<\/a>, such as the immigration detention system.<\/li>\n<li>This figure also does not include the huge and unquantifiable social price of overcriminalization, which falls on the shoulders of families, communities, and future generations.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Data show that the U.S\u2019s incarceration tab in 2010 came out to a whopping $82.4 billion. Which is actually a serious underestimate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52,1],"tags":[],"coauthors":[13],"class_list":["post-1866","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-briefings","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1866","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1866"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1866\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8497,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1866\/revisions\/8497"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1866"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=1866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}