The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

On average, 55% of state prisoners come home within 48 months, while those sent to Rikers Island to await trial or serve less than a year for less-serious crimes get out, on average, within a few weeks. Of all ex-offenders statewide, most are from New York City - and of these, the majority hail from, and return to, a handful of our neighborhoods.

At present, New York doesn't do enough to prepare this army of returning ex-inmates for basic challenges like finding housing, securing employment, kicking addiction and catching up on child support, according to a new report on reentry and employment commissioned by director Chauncy Parker of the state Division of Criminal Justice Services.

To make matters worse, the communities where most of the ex-prisoners will end up - upper Manhattan, the South Bronx, central Brooklyn and southeast Queens - are already overwhelmed by poverty and other problems. That's why so many former inmates slip through the cracks and end up jobless and homeless - and why two-thirds of them get rearrested within three years.

"We are funding a large-scale migration in and out of neighborhoods," says Eric Cadora, a scholar who runs the nonprofit Justice Mapping Center.

This revolving door system is expensive: It costs $32,400 a year to keep a man in prison, not counting the cost of prosecutors or the injuries and property loss suffered by victims.

According to Cadora, New York City and State Correction departments spend $359 million every year to lock up people from just one Brooklyn neighborhood, Brownsville - more than a billion dollars every three years - knowing full well that most of those being jailed will return and end up rearrested.

The sensible alternative to this costly futility would be to carve out a slice of the city and state Correction budgets - 5% or about $18 million a year would be a good start - and invest it in housing, jobs, education and addiction treatment right there in Brownsville. The savings, in human and economic terms, would be profound and immediate.

Parker and a few other forward-looking New York officials - notably, Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes, Deputy Mayor Linda Gibbs and city Correction Commissioner Martin Horn - have spent the last few years laying the groundwork for a new approach to reentry.

They have lately joined forces with thinkers like Jeremy Travis, the new president of John Jay College, and Susan Tucker of the Open Society Institute to push for radical changes in how New York spends its jail and prison dollars.

"We overuse incarceration," says Horn, who now spends $10 million a year on reentry programs for inmates leaving Rikers - more than any city or county in America.

"At the moment, the stars are aligned to do something different in New York City," says Tucker.

But only if more city and state officials start thinking outside the cell when it comes to keeping our neighborhoods safe.

Originally published on November 10, 2006