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At $75,560, housing a prisoner in California now costs more than a year at Harvard
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of Los Angeles Times/Associated Press


Los Angeles Times/Associated Press, June 4, 2017
Posted: May 8th, 2018
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-prison-costs-201706...

The cost of imprisoning each of Californias 130,000 inmates is expected to reach a record $75,560 in the next year. Thats enough to cover the annual cost of attending Harvard University and still have plenty left over. [The] spending plan for the fiscal year that starts July 1 includes a record $11.4 billion for the corrections department while also predicting that there will be 11,500 fewer inmates in four years because voters in November approved earlier releases for many inmates. The price for each inmate has doubled since 2005, even as court orders related to overcrowding have reduced the population by about one-quarter. Salaries and benefits for prison guards and medical providers drove much of the increase. The result is a per-inmate cost that is the nations highest and $2,000 above tuition, fees, room and board, and other expenses to attend Harvard. Since 2015, Californias per-inmate costs have surged nearly $10,000, or about 13%. Critics say with fewer inmates, the costs should be falling. New York is ... second in overall costs at about $69,000.

Note: Could it be that the privatization of prisons is driving up prison costs? For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing prison system corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.


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