By Ken Newton
St. Joseph News-Press
ST. JOSEPH, Mo. — In dollars-and-cents terms, the business of incarcerating lawbreakers compares to the business of farming … rising costs and a lot of uncertainties.
Those who pay for the jailing never know how many criminals will be convicted or how, or how long, judges will sentence them. They know, however, that costs seldom decrease in the housing of prisoners.
Consider that the Missouri Association of Counties celebrated in May the fact that the General Assembly left in place the $19.58 per diem rate for housing state prisoners. The rate had been $22 as recently as 2010.
R.T. Turner, presiding commissioner of Buchanan County since 2007, finds grim irony in jails not losing ground in funding. The projected 2014 average daily cost for offenders in Missouri’s adult correctional institutions is $60.66, almost $6 higher than four years earlier.
“You think of how the cost of everything has gone up, and they pay us even less now than they did seven years ago,” he said. “Somehow, they figure we can do it for a portion of that. And they’re doing it on an economy of scale.”
Society demands that bad people be punished, but the punishment of incarceration remains a significant governmental cost.
That holds true for the nation’s 3,300 jails, roughly three-quarters of them under the jurisdictions of county sheriffs.
The fiscal pinch gets felt in locales like Buchanan County, with its jail’s 224-bed capacity, and the state of Missouri, where 20 adult institutions house 31,000 prisoners on any given day.
Missouri lawmakers budgeted $677 million for corrections in the 2014 fiscal year, about a $10 million increase from the previous year. That amounts to about $21,610 annually per adult prisoner.
Based on that number alone, and not accounting for inflation, someone sentenced to prison for 30 years in Missouri would cost taxpayers more than $648,000.
Cost of doing business
The Vera Institute of Justice, a watchdog organization on correctional policies, says Missouri, like all states, typically understates the broader cost of incarceration by not including in budgets things like employee benefits, pension and retiree health costs and capital improvements.
Some of that state money flows into Northwest Missouri, where adult institutions reside in St. Joseph, Cameron, Chillicothe and Maryville.
The 2014 fiscal year funding includes:
Chillicothe Correctional Center, a female institution with a capacity of 1,164, about $12.1 million.
Western Missouri Correctional Center, in Cameron with a capacity of 1,958, about $15.4 million.
Western Reception, Diagnostic and Correctional Center, in St. Joseph with a capacity of 1,980, about $15.3 million.
Maryville Treatment Center, with a capacity of 525, about $5.7 million.
Crossroads Correctional Center, in Cameron with a capacity of 1,470, about $12 million.
Personnel costs play the biggest role in these funding items — the pay plan in the St. Joseph facility, for example, comes in at about $12.4 million — so taxpayers get an advantage of money cycling back through the communities.
Budgeted items like clothing for offenders, officer uniforms and vehicle replacement just become the price of doing business.
Food remains a large expense for Missouri prisons, with the institutions serving more than 35 million meals a year. The average cost of food, plus the equipment to generate the meals, amounts to $2.61 per inmate each day, up from $2.43 in 2010.
Medical care for prisoners also presents a big bill to taxpayers. Within the Missouri corrections budget for the Offender Rehabilitation Services division, a line item of about $150 million exists for medical services.
In Buchanan County, the budget for this year includes $340,000 for medical expenses, up about $16,000 from the 2011 figure. Mr. Turner said jail administrators chase down any health insurance that inmates might have to make sure taxpayers don’t suffer larger billings.
“But you still have to have a nurse on staff, people on medication every day and that gets dispensed,” the commissioner said. “All of that is a big cost.”
Staying
on the outside
The greatest opportunity to save money on incarceration expenses comes from not having prisoners rejoin the system after release. Finding an answer for lessening the recidivism rates is “one of the holy grails of corrections research,” according to David Marble, an assistant professor of criminal justice at Missouri Western State University.
Dr. Marble not only did his dissertation on offender recidivism but worked for a time in the Utah Department of Corrections, where he got a Medal of Merit for implementing a program in moral literacy.
Costs rise when the correctional system finds itself “churning” the population, seeing inmates get released, return to the ways (usually substance abuse) that got them jailed in the first place and then going back into the institution for violating the terms of probation.
A portion of prisoners who use opportunities to better themselves in the institution — educational, for example — stand a better chance of not returning, he said. Nothing, however, is absolute.
“The research shows that those inmates who involve themselves in programming or vocational training are less likely to recidivate,” Dr. Marble said. “But, the question is whether those guys are the ones who are going to come out and do well anyway.”
Judge Patrick Robb, presiding judge of the 5th Judicial Circuit in Buchanan and Andrew counties, has been on the bench for 26 years and had seen the churn of offenders.
Mr. Robb believes drug court has been a useful alternative to prison for those whose offenses primarily arise from substance abuse. First, he said, it takes people open to supervision and
treatment.
“Certainly some of those programs are expensive, but they’re less expensive than incarceration in the entire Department of Corrections,” the judge said. “We’re much better up front if we can try to facilitate change for individuals that want to change.”
Research has shown that those offenders who take advantage of the no-nonsense drug courts stay out of institutions at a much higher rate, Mr. Robb said.
“I always look at it as somewhat of a failure if we end up having to send them to prison,” he said.