Barozi said:
dsgrue3 said:
Life sentence of 80 years for 1 inmate costs approximately $4,000,000 in taxpayer monies.
It's way too expensive to keep prisoners alive who are serving life sentences. They also get full healthcare.
Exterminate the cretins and do away with victimless crimes.
Just wasteful an unnecessary usage of tax dollars. |
$4m ?
That would be more than an average worker would earn lifetime. Sounds like a bit too much but I agree that it's definitely expensive.
EDIT: Found some numbers from 2004.
Average annual costs of an inmate is $22,600 a year, so that would be $1.8m in 80 years (which is unrealistic since that would be far from the average a lifetime inmate would spend in prison)
life expectancy for an 18 year old male would be around 74 years (a bit lower but I don't find the exact number), so if he gets a life long sentence he will be in prison for 56 years on average, which would then be $1.2m (using the 2004 numbers)
|
Nice to have some numbers. I must admit I used 50k as the basis due to an economics professor. They may have been referring to a specific state.
According to this (2009 FY) it's closer to your figure at $25,251.
https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2011/02/03/2011-2363/annual-determination-of-average-cost-of-incarceration
Let's take an average life sentence of 50 years. $1.26M
According to this article, 10% of all prisoners are serving life sentences.
7.3 Million are incarcerated. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States#Prison_population
730,000 are serving life sentences.
730,000 * 1.26M = 919,800,000,000
We're spending nearly a trillion dollars on criminals serving life sentences.
