Editorial
By:
Another dubious milestone in American history was achieved recently when the nation’s prison and jail population topped 2 million for the first time.
Don’t we all feel safer now?
The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that our prisons and jails hold one in every 142 U.S. residents. During the 12-month period ending June 30, 2002, the federal prison population went up 5.7 percent, the state prison population 1 percent and the local jail population 5.4 percent a clean sweep for the forces of law and order.
Among the states, little Rhode Island led the way with a whopping 17.4-percent increase in prisoners, followed by New Mexico (11.1 percent), West Virginia and Maine (8.7 percent each) and Montana (8.2 percent). Altogether, 41 states experienced growth in the prison population. Among the nine states experiencing a decline in the number of prisoners, Illinois led the way with a 5.5-percent decrease, followed by Texas (3.9 percent), New York (2.9 percent), Delaware (2.3 percent) and California (2.2 percent.)
New Jersey’s prison population dropped two-tenths of a percent, from 28,108 on June 30, 2001, to 28,054 a year later.
These statistics are useful for several reasons. First, they serve to remind us that corrections is a growth industry. The economy may ebb and flow, the stock market may hit peaks and valleys, unemployment may rise and fall but the prisons and jails just keep right on growing. Second, they illustrate the enormous impact corrections costs can have on state budgets; it’s no accident that the states facing the biggest budget shortfalls Illinois, Texas, New York, California are the ones that have seen fit in the past year to reduce their prison populations.
In New Jersey, it now costs about $1 billion a year to run the corrections system. That’s billion, with a B. That’s three times as much as the state spends annually for environmental protection. Divide the corrections budget by the number of prisoners and the cost per prisoner comes to $35,714 or about the same as tuition, room and board for a year at Princeton University.
The reason for this is not, as the lock-’em-up-and-throw-away-the-key crowd likes to argue, that we coddle our prisoners in hotel-like institutions. A brief tour of Trenton, Rahway or Leesburg will quickly disabuse a visitor of this notion. The fact is, the cost of constructing and running even the barest-bones prison is astronomical, given not only the extraordinarily expensive security measures that are required (double-thick walls, high-tech surveillance systems and the like) but the extensive personnel involved; the expense of three eight-hour shifts a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year with holiday pay, overtime pay and fringe benefits mounts up mighty fast.
And what does all this money buy us in terms of safety? That’s very debatable. Most experts agree that the link between the incarceration rate and the crime rate is tenuous at best. These days, with the prisons and jails bursting at the seams with inmates serving mandatory minimum sentences for drug violations (or the third strike of a three-strikes-and-you’re-out trifecta), rather than indeterminate or discretionary sentences for more violent crimes, this link is perhaps weaker than it has ever been.
We would frankly feel a whole lot safer if our criminal-justice and corrections policies served to protect us from the real dangers we face, as opposed to those that make the most convenient targets for politicians.
And we’d feel that our tax dollars were being put to far better use if the Legislature followed the advice of most experts, including corrections officials, by spending more on drug-treatment slots and less on prison cells. For the past couple of decades, the combination of hard data, expert opinion and common sense seems to have fallen on deaf ears. The long-awaited wake-up call may soon arrive, however, in the form of fiscal reality.

