In article , JimT wrote:
"HeyBub" wrote in message
om...
JimT wrote:
"HeyBub" wrote in message
m...
JimT wrote:
Only temporarily. Most will get scooped up straightaway and sent to
the Greybar Hotel.
After Katrina, crime shot up in Houston until the Houston Police
made it clear that one just can't be moseyin' thru the 'hood with a
malt and a toke.
Yeah...lockem' up. How much does that cost again?
Not a lot. In Texas, inmates grow virtually all their own food
(except the obvious: pepper, coffee, etc.). We've got prison cattle
ranches, pig farms, egg factories, and corn fields. Inmates grow
cotton, gin it, and make their own clothes. Most prisons are built
with convict (non-union) labor.
As for cost, consider your typical Heroin addict.
Your average addict will shoot one "paper" of Heroin per day at a
street cost of about $100. Assuming most don't have that much spare
cash, that means the addict has to rob, or more often, steal
something for which he can get a hundred bucks. In reality, he has
to steal about four times what he expects to get (hey, the fence has
to make a living). That's $400 per day taken out of the economy.
Every day. Or, about $150,000 per year per addict.
In a modest sized city, it's not unreasonable to assume there are
5,000 addicts wandering the streets. If they each act like the one I
just described, that's $730 million of wealth destroyed each year
just due to Heroin. Then there's Marijuana, crack-Cocaine, and more.
We can keep a goblin locked up for a paltry $35,000 per year. That's
a saving of over $100,000 per year for each squint behind bars. The
more we incarcerate, the more we save.
Then there are the residual savings. Here in Texas, prisoners make
(and repair) "stuff" which is sold at cost to other agencies of
government. Texas Correctional Industries manufacture things that
range from mops to furniture, trash cans to saddles, truck beds to
toilets. The savings to county and city governments is not trivial.
For a catalog of available products, see he
http://www.tci.tdcj.state.tx.us/
That's how much it "costs." Bottom line: Again, the more people we
lock up, the more we save.
You're out of touch with reality:
http://tinyurl.com/243lcsq
Interesting graph - but it represents national averages, not Texas.
California, for example, the cost is a bit over $47,000 per inmate per
year compared to Texas' $18,000. (Others I've found: Massachusetts -
$46,000; Michigan - $30,500; National Average - $23,000)
There are several reasons the cost here is lower: As I mentioned,
prisoners grow their own food. We don't have an all-powerful prison guard
union in Texas. And unless the bone is sticking out, prisoners don't get
much medical care.
Further, the cost of corrections is like the cost of termite protection.
It costs more today than it did ten years ago, true, but the cost is still
much less than allowing the insects to run loose.
Bottom line: Even at California or Massachusetts rates, locking 'em up is
still a bargain for the community. A bargain in preventing loss, a bargain
in insurance rates, and a bargain in emotional trauma.
I tried to find your stats but I ran across this:
http://www.nicic.org/features/statestats/?State=TX
Doesn't appear to back you up.
"2008 Corrections Percentage of Total State Government Expenditures
Taxpayers paid 1% higher than than the national average in 2008."
????
Wow...TX has the highest % in jail. Yet the crime rate is still higher than
the nat. avg.
It appears to me that Texas, despite lower cost per inmate, has
above-average % of state budget for "corrections" due to spending less
elsewhere or due to having higher percentage of its population in
prison.
(Not that I find too much fault with keeping career criminals behind
bars as opposed to letting them out to commit more crime.)
Above-national-average % of population in prison is result of rather
than a cause of above-national-average crime rate.
Maybe Texas needs to do more for crime prevention, otherwise maybe Texas
has more than its national-average-share of outlaws.
- Don Klipstein )