Budget Issues
- According to the National Institute of Justice, the fixed cost of building a prison ranges from $60k - $75k per inmate and the average operating cost for prisons is about $60 for each inmate every day (or about $22,000 annually per inmate)[i]
- It costs $113,187 to build a maximum security prison per prison bed (design capacity) and the estimated operating cost is $26,500 per year to house a 3-striker in a maximum security prison (does not include medical costs, which have been estimated to be in excess of $60,000 per year for prisoners over the age of 55).
- For Fiscal Year 2007-2008, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) was allocated a total of $9,776,618,000.[ii]
- "Thirty years ago, 2% of California's budget went to prisons," Gilmore said. "Now it's supposed to be 9.7%, but the Department of Prisons has already overspent its budget by $1.2 billion and nobody seems to care."[iii]
- Annual budgets for the California Department of Corrections:
1955 $20.4 million
1965 $78.3 million
1975 $198.7 million
1985 $728 million
2002 $4.8 billion
- Had Proposition 66 passed, it likely would have resulted in reduced future prison incarceration costs of several hundreds of millions of dollars annually.[iv]
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[i] Winning the War
[ii]http://www.cdcr.ca.gov/Budget/index.html
[iii] Gary Gilmore, http://www.laprogressive.com/law-and-the-justice-system/prison-industrial-complex-california/
[iv]http://www.lao.ca.gov/2005/3_strikes/3_strikes_102005.htm
