California has by far the costliest system of incarceration in the nation. It’s now $102,796 per state prisoner per year. It’s projected to be about $112,691 in fiscal 2022 – quadruple the average cost of the 18 states with the least-costly rates. Thank the CA prison guards’ labor union for this “gift” that keeps on giving.
We’ve dramatically cut the number of state prisoners, but NOT the number of guards. The “savings” evaporated under union pressures.
One reason our costs are far higher than the other states is that most states have some less expensive PRIVATE state prisons. The CA guards’ union got laws passed that essentially make it illegal to have private state prisons here. Thus, unlike other states, the CA labor union doesn’t have to worry about the guards’ compensation pricing them out of the market. There IS no such market in CA.
BTW, the $112,000 cost per prisoner significantly understates the real cost, because like all CA government agencies, the cost of the guards’ pensions and retiree health care is not fully stated in the budgets. This unfunded liability keeps growing and growing and growing . . . .
State prison population shrinks, but spending goes up — to $112K per inmate
Sacramento Bee
It now costs more than $100,000 per year on average to imprison one person in California, according to Finance Department figures.
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s budget proposal projects the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation will spend an average $102,736 on each inmate for the fiscal year that ends June 30. The figure is projected to rise to $112,691 per inmate next fiscal year.
The record-high costs emphasize a counterintuitive trend: prison spending keeps going up even as the inmate population shrinks.
The coronavirus pandemic has exaggerated the trend. California’s prison population has dropped by 26,000 since February 2020, propelled by early releases of low-level offenders. Yet the corrections department will spend about $1.2 billion more in the next fiscal year under Gov. Gavin Newsom’s latest budget proposal.
The latest budget figures, while affected by emergency pandemic spending, fall in line with years-long trends. California’s per-inmate spending captured headlines when it cleared $75,000 in 2017, prompting comparisons to a year’s tuition at Harvard and Stanford universities.
California’s 35 state-run prisons held about 130,000 inmates then. Now they hold about 97,200. The corrections department’s budget was $11.4 billion then. Now, in Newsom’s proposal for the fiscal year starting July 1, the state would spend $13.5 billion.