A Crossroads: Rikers and the Cost of Mass Incarceration

New York City jails are a $1.1 billion problem. According to a recent report from the city comptroller, the city spends an exorbitant $100,000 per inmate in 2014, the result of a 42 percent increase in costs over the past seven years.
“In comparison, the Los Angeles Country jail, another enormous urban jail, spends an average of $47,000 per inmate. So we’re paying double the price, but we’re getting terrible outcomes,” said Marc Schindler, the executive director of the Justice Policy Institute, a national non-profit that researches and advances criminal justice policies, in an interview with the HPR. The city comptroller reported that allegations of guards’ using physical force have tripled over the last seven years.
“This is at a time when the prison population is at its lowest and the number of correctional officers is at its highest. So the ratio of correctional officers to inmates is not the problem; it’s not that they aren’t spending lots of money,” Mr. Schindler continued. In fact, the ratio of guards to inmates has increased 19 percent over the last seven years. Nonetheless, a key part of the correction commissioner Joseph Ponte’s strategy has been to increase the number of prison guards. Mr. Ponte has halved the ratio of guards to inmate from 33:1 to 15:1. While increasing the number of correction officers may allow them to supervise inmates more closely, it does little to change the pernicious “culture of violence” in which these guards operate.
“I definitely don’t think that what we need is more money in the prison system,” Professor Hinton explained. “From 1965 onward we’ve been re-appropriating money from education, employment programs, recreational facilities, and community centers. We’ve disinvested from all those programs and invested in law enforcement, so that in many low-income communities—not just in the South Bronx and in Crown Heights—police officers are the only public institution remaining.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if the next thing we see coming out of New York is reporting from the U.S. Attorney’s office that there is misuse of funds, abuse of overtime, and some corruption going on within the Department of Corrections in New York City that is allowing these enormous overtime costs,” Mr. Schindler added. “Can we say that for sure? We can’t, but it wouldn’t surprise me.”
As these astronomical costs put pressure on Rikers and prisons across the country to reform, they may only be driving correction departments more and more toward privatization.
“Right now, we’re at a crossroads because of the gigantic costs of incarceration,” Elizabeth Hinton, an Assistant Professor of History and of African and African American Studies at Harvard, stated. “I could see us beginning to de-incarcerate and hopefully change our policing practices, or I could see us moving towards greater and greater privatization of prisons. That’s the question we’re facing.”
And tellingly, when New York City needed to create a Rikers Island reform plan, it turned to McKinsey & Company, a management consulting firm mostly known for its work with large corporations. McKinsey received a $1.7 million contract.
“I think it’s interesting that they contracted with McKinsey because it reflects the correction department’s priorities,” Professor Hinton commented. “They could have hired one of the many non-profit organizations that have done excellent studies on juvenile justice alternatives and community-based programs, but they decided to bring in a corporation. That indicates to me that they’re interested in efficiency and business-management principles instead of thinking about the conditions of confinement for the youth at Rikers.”
In fact, juvenile justice systems across the country have turned to privatization as a way of cutting costs. “In Florida, the entire juvenile detention system is privatized at this point,” Professor Hinton noted. “Either mass incarceration is going to stop, or prison is going to become a for-profit system.”
This article is the second in a three-part series on Rikers prison system. You can find the first here.