14 Feb 2012 - Expensive Prisoners

I was discussing with a work colleague today, who used to work for the department of corrections, how our prison system works. This is an area that I had never really thought about the costs to the state of keeping prisoners. I have always thought in terms of, you commit a crime, you deserve to go to prison. Sometimes I have heard about a crime and thought, wow that was a light sentence for the crime that was committed. However, overall I try to keep in mind that you never get all the facts of a case from the media, they generally are just trying to sell newspapers, so I prefer to just trust that our judges know what they are doing and tend not to speculate on the subject. My discussion today however really highlighted to me the disincentive that judges are faced with when deciding to put someone in prison, and highlighted why in some cases it might be better to reduce a sentence, or replace it with community service. My colleague told me that it costs approximately $80,000 a year to maintain one prisoner, a figure I checked on the department of justice website, which estimated the average cost at approximately $94,000 annually per prisoner.

Taking these figures into consideration and considering we have nearly 5,000 prisoners in institutions across the state, it costs nearly $470 million a year to maintain our prison system. None of the 5,000 prisoners are contributing to society in any way, so it is not like any of them are giving back to the community or the State, they are a pure cost. I can see why a judge might wish to be more lenient in some cases where, yes, somebody may have committed a crime, but they are repentant, a first offender, and don't pose a threat to public safety. In these sorts of cases, giving them something like community service is a great option because they are contributing to the community performing tasks that need doing usually, and they can probably still hold down full time employment, so are contributing to taxes which are keep other criminals housed where they belong. Now I am not saying that we need to be more lenient on prisoners to reduce costs, but I think that people need to keep this in mind when judging how unfair we consider certain sentences. Also I think that we need to trust that our judges are doing a very difficult job in balancing what is best for the individual who committed the crime, what is best for our society and the potential costs to our society of housing so many prisoners who are not contributing.

The cost figures came from the Victorian Department of Justice website.