The federal government has its budget all in a bunch, but are the states doing any better? When it comes to the alarming amount of money being spent on imprisonment, neither the federal nor state governments seem to have found a way to effectively keep prison populations (and costs) down. Here’s how your tax money is being spent on inmates.
Cost of incarceration in state prisons is $39 billion. The most expensive state to be imprisoned in is New York, where the annual cost per prisoner is a striking $60,000. Meanwhile, Kentucky is keeping its cost low with an annual inmate cost of around $14,000.
Moving on to federal prisons, the annual cost totals up to being $5.78 billion in order to keep these facilities running. Add those two totals up, and your state and federal taxes are taking a lump sum from your pocket to put towards prisons.
And let’s not forget Guantanamo Bay, the most expensive prison, which costs $445 million a year to hold a mere 41 prisoners. Sounds like a waste of money in its finest form, but we’ve all seen Orange Is The New Black, so we know what it’s like inside these facilities.
