PRISON STATE
a Few Modest Proposals for Reform in California

There have been dozens of news articles over the last two months looking at California's current budget crisis. This issue, like so many others, has served as a prime opportunity for political finger pointing as both sides struggle to devise ways to trim spending.

Healthcare, education, welfare services-- they're all in line to take a hit. But one massive component of the budget isn't getting much consideration as a candidate for cutbacks. The California prison system is hemorrhaging, yet state legislators feel that the appropriate remedy is to slap another Band-Aid on a gaping wound.

The state's prison population has grown 800% in the last 30 years, forcing a penal system designed to house 100,000 inmates to hold 170,000 (and counting). In response to this swell, California taxpayers have spent almost $6 billion to build 21 new prisons since 1980. In contrast, the state built 12 prisons in the previous 150 years. According to a Washington Post article, someone driving from Oregon to Mexico along Highway 5 is never more than an hour's drive from a prison.

But the state still can't keep up. Despite the explosion in the number of McPrisons, we have reached max capacity, a most critical mass. Governor Schwarzenegger's 2007-2008 budget proposal allocated $10.6 billion to maintaining the prison system, a figure that does not include the additional $7.4 billion the state will borrow in order to boost prison capacity by 40,000. Interest alone on that debt will amount to $330 million a year by 2011. Compare that to the $10.5 billion the state allocates the combined University of California, California State University, and California Community College systems.

The high costs of our prison system are simply a result of flawed and grossly inefficient criminal justice policies. In the following sections, I highlight two of these economically inefficient policies. This analysis is largely based on the theory of optimal deterrence, aka the "economics model of crime," first devised by Dr. Gary Becker, a professor at the University of Chicago.

Becker's model, which earned him a Nobel prize, suggested a philosophical shift in our approach to preventing criminal activity. The conventional belief is that our criminal justice system exists mainly to punish criminals. But punishing criminals is a very expensive endeavor, especially when using imprisonment, and it imposes huge net costs on society.

Consider a criminal who is sentenced to one year in prison, that person suffers losses more or less equal to the income he would earned if not in prison. That loss is coupled with the additional $24,000 a year it costs taxpayers to house an inmate. If a person earning minimum wage spends a year in jail, the net cost to society is about $40,000-- a combination of the criminal's lost productivity and the amount taxpayers must spend to house him.

That's an awfully high price to pay just to 'punish' someone for the sake of justice, in the hope that he 'learns his lesson.' But Becker looked at it differently. He saw these enforcement costs as a purchase. Basically, by paying to imprison criminals, we buy a certain amount of deterrence. The threat of imprisonment obviously deters future crimes, and thus saves on future enforcement costs. Additionally, imprisonment itself acts as a prophylactic, in the sense that someone who is in jail is greatly limited in his opportunity to commit more crimes.

Becker's analysis lent itself to a somewhat counterintuitive idea-- the optimal amount of crime is not zero. We can, in theory, prevent all crimes. If we made all crimes punishable by life in prison, quadrupled the size of our police force, and installed an exhaustive surveillance system, surely we would see a massive decrease in crime. But the added cost of maintaining these measures would not be justified by the benefit of prevention.

It is simple cost-benefit analysis: we should only prevent those crimes for which the benefit of deterrence is greater than the net cost to society. As it stands, there are two policies, discussed herein, which lead us to overpay for the amount of deterrence we receive.


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