Corrections

The number of Americans locked up has quadrupled in the last 25 years to almost 2 million, as states used longer sentences to get tough on crime. In Michigan, the prison population has increased almost five times since 1975 to nearly 50,000. Nationwide, an increasing number of released inmates, two of three in 1994 committed another serious crime within three years. In Michigan, of the 7,701 inmates paroled in 1995, 40 percent returned within four years for either a parole violation or new sentence. That's up from 26 percent of the inmates paroled in 1991.

In 1972, there were about 200,000 felons incarcerated in U.S. prisons. By 2003, that number had grown to 1.2 million. When combined with jail populations, today there are more than 2 million people incarcerated on any given day. About 600,000 adults enter prison each year, and there are upwards of 9 million jail admissions annually (some individuals account for multiple entries). When probation and parole caseloads are included, about 4% of the adult population is under some form of state penal control today. At no time in history has there been such a drawn out reliance on growing the mechanisms of formal social control in any society, be it democratic, capitalist, or otherwise.

The average cost to keep one person incarcerated for a year in 1992 was about $25,000, and the average cost to keep one person on probation for a year was $5,000. When we multiply by the number of people under each form of corrections, the total costs are about $47 billion per year. Add to that the costs of law enforcement and the total climbs to about $71 billion a year. And this does not include the costs of courts and prosecution, nor the costs of building prisons and jails. The direct costs of incarceration range from about a thousand dollars a month for a minimum security, dormitory style lock-up with no significant counseling, to about three thousand dollars monthly for a high security suicide watch, and the indirect costs to the community are even higher. When the person who is imprisoned needs mental health services, add about $50 per hour to these costs up to $100 thousand per year. On average, it would be much cheaper to give a person a year in college than a year in a juvenile hall, jail, or prison.

Sending nonviolent offenders to state prison, as a way to temporarily prevent them from committing new crimes is a costly proposition. But local jails and probation departments are overloaded, making them ineffective options. Over recent years, correctional officials nationwide have begun to expand community-based programs that combine punishment including some types of incarceration with treatment programs. These programs provide immediate fiscal benefits and hold significant potential to substantially decrease the large numbers of new crimes that