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Crime doesn’t pay — but it costs a fortune.
The city spent about $167,000 per inmate last year and had 12,287 prisoners on an average day, according to the Independent Budget Office’s first-ever study of the Big Apple’s jails.
“The numbers provide a troubling statistical portrait of the more than 12,000 people in our city jails on a typical day last year, coming at a significant fiscal cost to the city and no doubt great social cost to families and communities,” said the IBO’s Doug Turetsky.
He said the average annual cost per inmate covers additional expenses, such as staff salaries, fringe benefits, facility maintenance and capital expenditures.
Michael Jacobson, former president of the Vera Institute of Justice and a former city correction commissioner, says those fixed costs don’t change.
He said the city’s incarceration numbers are down by nearly half since the early ’90s, when crack flooded city neighborhoods. In 1992, the daily inmate population peaked at 21,000.
“Jail is an expensive proposition, which is why you want to use it only when you have to use it,” Jacobson said.
The analysis found a huge disparity when it came to race: 57 percent of inmates were black, 33 percent Hispanic and 7 percent white.
Also, 93 percent of those locked up were male and three-quarters were pre-trial detainees. The other one-quarter were sentenced to city jail time or awaiting transfer to state prisons.
A small number of the incarcerated, 7 percent, were ages 16 to 18.
Jacobson said that number is lower than it was when he was commissioner. This is due, he said, to city efforts to provide adolescents with alternatives to incarceration.