Last Year California Spent $75,560 on Each Prisoner
by John Lawrence, June 16, 2018
The prison industry complex is big business. It costs as much per year per prisoner as it costs for a year of grad school at Stanford or Harvard. These corporations that run prisons are very profitable. But they need a continual flow of gist for the mill. That's where black people come in. A goodly percentage of the prisoners are black. They are guilty of such crimes as driving while black, walking while black and existing while black. It doesn't help that some of them have a chip on their shoulder in the first place and are defiant rather than compliant when approached by the police.
The LA Times reported:
The price for each inmate has doubled since 2005, even as court orders related to overcrowding have reduced the population by about one-quarter. Salaries and benefits for prison guards and medical providers drove much of the increase.
The result is a per-inmate cost that is the nation’s highest — and $2,000 above tuition, fees, room and board, and other expenses to attend Harvard.
Since 2015, California’s per-inmate costs have surged nearly $10,000, or about 13%. New York is a distant second in overall costs at about $69,000.
The prison system has one well paid employee for every two inmates. Really? Is that necessary? While spending that much per prisoner California spends next to nothing on the homeless - poor people that have not committed a crime. California does have a plan to spend $2 billion to build housing for the homeless, but that bill is tied up in court.
The LA Times reports:
Nearly two years after California lawmakers approved a $2-billion bond to help finance new housing for the state's homeless, not a penny has been spent, and it's unclear when any of the money will be available.
The dollars are tied up in court as a Sacramento attorney challenges the state's plan to pay off that debt with money California voters approved in 2004 for mental health services. The funding, the attorney contends, should not be diverted from treatment programs, even if the mentally ill benefit from the housing. State housing officials said they don't know how long the litigation will take to resolve.
So taxpayers don't mind spending $75,000 a year per prisoner, but balk at spending $2 billion to build housing for the homeless. What did they do to deserve free housing? The prisoners did something to deserve theirs. They committed a crime. We will spend unlimited amounts on criminals, but hardly anything to house the homeless. What's wrong with this picture? Do the homeless have to commit crimes in order to get housing, medical care and 3 squares a day?
