Civilization and its Discontents

Today Susan Tordella at End Mass Incarceration Together (EMIT) wrote about putting prison employees to work implementing rehabilitation programs for inmates. Tordella reminded us that more rehabilitation correlates strongly with less recidivism and wrote that European prisons have markedly lower rates than the United States because they focus on change, not punishment. Only about 2% of the governor’s $640 million Department of Corrections budget is earmarked for programs for incarcerated people — and much of this is outsourced.

So as long as the state has money for guards, Tordella asks, why not utilize all the skills of corrections officers? She suggests CO’s could “serve as [rehabilitation] program officers who share a skill and/or knowledge with the people in their care. The program can be practically anything — culinary, GED preparation/tutoring, plumbing, carpentry, writing, running a small business, yoga/mindfulness, college or high school classes, computer repair/programming, job skills, trauma awareness/healing, or sales and communication skills…”

What a great idea. And why couldn’t the same thing be done at the county level? We looked at pay stubs for all county prisons from the Comptroller of the Commonwealth for the first quarter of 2018, determined the number of employees, and extrapolated annual costs for each county. The state only publishes prison capacity figures for DOC facilities but someone pointed us toward county overcrowding reports from 2015 — the last year reported — so we at least had a reasonable snapshot of inmate counts for each county as well.

The table below does not represent all the costs of running a prison — technology, infrastructure, vehicles, power, maintenance, food, medical, education, or rehabilitation — much of it outsourced. But the table paints a good picture of how expensive just the corrections officers are. Looking only at salaries, the price tag is $42,474 per year (in jailer costs) to throw someone in a Massachusetts county jail. Far more if you include the rest. With this obscene amount of money being spent, shouldn’t taxpayers be trying to have fewer repeat offenders, more education, and effective rehabilitation?

Here in Massachusetts we spend half a BILLION dollars on just the jailers for our county jails. There are 6,629 men and women who put handcuffs on another 11,480 men and women in 14 county facilities and leave education and rehabilitation to others. There are very close to 2 prisoners for each staff person — or 6 per shift — which makes one wonder why more of these employees couldn’t be put to work implementing rehabilitation program services.