|
Almost all the money you spend to imprison people goes to paying
the guards.
The prison staff collects enormous incomes and
astonishing benefits at taxpayer expense.
Very little goes to
the prisoners themselves.
Each Pennsylvania citizen, man, woman and child pays an average of $114.81 each year to imprison 41,628 of their fellow citizens in state prisons. About half of those prisoners should be on parole earning money and paying taxes. The Pennsylvania Parole Board refuses to let them become productive citizens. The Pennsylvania prison system is a very expensive failure. I examined the imprisonment budget to help counter official distortions fed to the legislators and taxpayers by the Department of Imprisonment. (They call themselves the Department of "Corrections," but there's no correction, only warehousing.) We taxpayers spend more to imprison a person in Pennsylvania than it would cost to send him to the best state college, almost twice as much, as a matter of fact. The average prisoner costs the taxpayers $33,615 a year to imprison. For about $18,000 he could get a college education. For about $25,000 he could be followed around on the street by a parole agent, one on one. But that wouldn't satisfy the revenge crowd. The prison system employs about 15,000 people. The real reason the Pennsylvania prison system is the way it is, is to provide those 15,000 jobs to the largely unemployable. The principal cost of the prisons is in paying those 15,000 employees. Each one costs $9,412 just for their health benefits. That's over 10% of the imprisonment budget all by itself! Ridiculous Republican legislators have imposed a whole set of vindictive programs on the Pennsylvania prison system. These programs are aimed at hurting the prisoners and their families. They don't benefit crime victims or taxpayers. One of these schemes forces penniless prisoners to pay fines and restitution while they are imprisoned. Since the prisoners have almost nothing, the money really comes from the prisoners' families. Most of those families are impoverished themselves. The prison system brags that they squeezed $3,224,196 out of the prisoners in a year, or about $75 per prisoner. The prison administrators don't mention the fact that for each dollar bled from a prisoner, it costs more than $2.75 in administrative expenses. In other words, it costs $2.75 to collect $1! Who could dream up such a system except a Republican legislator? It's a form of financial torture. Another vindictive program charges prisoners $2 for being sick. It costs about $5 to collect the $2! Real bright! Whats worse is that many prisoners can't afford to spend even $2 so they become more and more sick, costing the system more and more money and spreading their diseases to other prisoners and staff. In fairness, we taxpayers pay the healthcare of both the prisoners and the staff. Each guard costs the taxpayers $9,412. Providing medical care to the prisoners costs less than half as much. The average prisoner costs $4,319 for medical care each year. Most prisoners can't survive in prison without money from their families. Pennsylvania imprisonment is a super-tax on impoverished families. The wife who earns only about $15,000 as a supermarket clerk typically shares some of it with her imprisoned husband. At the same time, taxpayers spend over $61,000 a year to pay a prison check-out clerk! To elaborate on the financial mismanagement of the imprisonment industry, I've compiled the information below. It reflects the cost to imprison a person in each of the state's prisons. What it fails to show, however is the great cost of the staff, on average over $60,000 each a year. There are fewer that 3 prisoners for each member of the staff so a place like the state prison at Camp Hill across the river from Harrisburg costs $86,246,000.00 to operate. Taxpayers spend about 8 times as much to imprison a young black man than to educate him. Pennsylvania needs better financial priorities. Cost At Each Pennsylvania Prison For A Year of Imprisonment. The Number of Prisoners In Each Prison. The Ranks of the Prisons with the 10 Largest Populations. Notes About Some of the Prisons.
"We pardon to the extent that You are welcome to use or republish
any of our material.
|