Exposing “Incarceration Costs”
The Fraud of Incarceration Costs: Much of the efforts aimed at “reforming” the justice system use “costs of incarceration” as a basis to legalize conduct or reduce the current number of inmates in prison. Make no mistake … these “costs” are simply a theoretical, bureaucratic number. I address these costs throughout the book, but here is an excerpt from my book describing just one example I came across (on accident).
Injustice for All: The (Familiar) Fallacies of Criminal Justice Reform: As I was writing this book, I had pulled several numbers regarding the costs of incarceration from the Oklahoma Department of Corrections website in December 2019. Later, in February 2020, I went back to the website to get the numbers for a colleague who was participating in a debate on prison overcrowding, but the numbers were thousands of dollars higher per inmate compared to the figures posted just two months prior. Oklahoma was in the process of reducing its prison population based on a number of measures during various reform movements. As costs of incarceration are simply created by taking the overall budget divided by the number of inmates, the cost of incarceration per inmate will increase when the prison population decreases without a corresponding reduction in budget. Incredibly, by releasing inmates under the pretense of saving incarceration costs, Oklahoma instantly calculated an increased cost to house an inmate. One should wonder why a fiscal conservative would place so much faith in government accounting.
Moving Forward: The foregoing example should outrage fiscal conservatives, media outlets demanding transparency in government, or just about anyone other than a Machiavellian social justice warrior … but it has gone unnoticed. The propaganda of incarceration costs is a cog in the wheel of criminal justice reform – we don’t really need to combat it, but simply expose it.
