GOVERNMENT WASTE
The Outrageous Prison $ystem In America
Like many scattered worldwide, I logged on to Zoom to see my family in Spring 2020. I was happy to do so because my immediate family members were all in good health, but the occasion was especially auspicious because my brother was home. During the call, my brother spoke about being chased home by two older boys because we were the only black family in town. Even though he laughs about the incident now, I couldn’t help but notice how we missed the tell-tale signs of trauma growing up. He fought back and could return home safely because of this fact, but the lesson he learned as a child from this incident was that he needed to use his fist to solve problems. Unfortunately, for so many in this country, this becomes a means of survival. This is why conversations about prison are such an arduous task to undertake, but I think it is one the United States needs to have absent the old trope of crime and punishment.
The United States, in total, is wasting an estimated $14,840,000,000 on the cost of prisoners. The annual cost of one inmate in New Jersey is $44,000, and there are 2.12 million people incarcerated in the United States alone. The yearly tuition cost of an education at Princeton University is $37,000. Using New Jersey’s inmate cost as a metric, there is a difference of $7,000 leftover after subtracting the cost that it would take to pay for the best education in the country for each inmate. One can immediately take away from such a gross discrepancy because it runs deeper than overspending. By overspending on imprisonment, the government is willfully devaluing the future potential of the population as a whole.
By using Princeton for comparison, we can see a severe problem. However, the annual average(in-state) cost of tuition at public universities is $10,560. With what we are paying to incarcerate one inmate annually, we could fund four students per year. So, we are not just imprisoning 2.12 million people; we may be preventing 8.48 million people from receiving an investment in their education.
In 2019, there were approximately 19.6 million college students, with 14.5 million enrolled in public universities. Based on this number, the U.S. could provide free education for most public universities’ student bodies by simply using the money wasted on the prison system. Some might worry how we will reform the individuals currently serving time if we reinvest this money into education? I would reply that a system that prevents one from becoming economically stable after time served is not meant to reform anyone.
In the first calendar year after release, a formerly incarcerated individual’s earnings average $10,090. Being that the average time served by inmates is 2.6 years, there is no reason we can not at least provide community college for free. The median annual income of someone who has completed an associate’s degree is $46,124. When you consider this, one realizes that the $14,840,000,000 the government spends on the prison system grows exponentially once the formerly incarcerated are freed. So what was $7,000 that could have been used to teach someone who has made a mistake a valuable skill to do better in the future now becomes $36,034 in lost annual wages. This means that if the total prison population were a part of the working population with associate’s degrees, the U.S. would see an additional estimate of $76,392,080,000 within the economy. Considering such gross negligence when it comes to government spending, one can only conclude that the prison system either needs to be abolished or that we need to consider the prison population as individuals with potential that need to be invested in.
Even with the numbers I have highlighted, I have yet to touch on the gross injustice of government. Until this point, I have used overspending as a reason we need to reform the prison system. However, the total estimated cost of $93,280,000,000 has been ignored, which means that instead of educating 8,833,333, we are choosing to create 2.21 million economically disadvantaged citizens.
Suppose the U.S. were to change the way we thought about criminal justice and choose to invest in 8,833,333 students from disadvantaged neighborhoods annually. In that case, we could see an additional $407,428,666,666 in earnings per year put back into the economy. So with a tax rate of a little over 50%, the extra income of the 8.83 million educated individuals would be able to pay for the college students. I am sure that Republicans would argue that a little over 50% is too high of a tax rate, but what we paid under Reagan.
I cannot say that this is the best solution for America’s prison system, but I know that this is a better solution. Having grown up in a household with a family member who has been incarcerated, I know that the civil justice system does more harm than good. Many end up in prison because of underlying conditions, and most prisons don’t provide the services needed for treatment.
We need to stop thinking about it as one person going to prison. When one family member is locked up, all who care for them are restrained from progress. To survive within a prison, inmates need money on their commissary account. This means they either need the family to put money in or the inmate must work within the prison.
Even communication has a cost. For example, one has to send a collect call to receive calls, which adds on to large phone bills. So to survive as a family, you have to cut corners in whatever way you can, which only compounds to create additional burdens which everyone feels. This is why we not only need to start talking about the prison system. We need to think about solutions that help imprisoned individuals and ways to create opportunities within their communities.
