The Prison Budget

Monday, February 24th, 2014

As the prison population has swelled, so has the prison budget:

In 1980, the U.S. spent $6.9 billion a year on its prison system; today, it is $80 billion. If you include the entire system of mass incarceration — judicial, legal, police — we spend an estimated $260 billion per year on on so-called corrections.

The costs of incarceration on an individual scale range from $21,000 a year (in a federal, minimum security prison) to a little more than $47,000 per year in California.

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