Blog: Just My Opinion on How to Balance the Federal Budget

Can we help balance the national budget through revamping the justice system?

Just my friendly opinon...

In 2008, the Justice Department released a report totaling the nation’s prison population at a whopping 2.3 million inmates, the same report stated that “prison populations during 2006 increased more than 3 times the average annual rate of growth from 2000 to 2005.” Researchers started to notice this rise back in the 1960s. This trend increasingly grew over the next several decades. In the 1980s the nation began to experience trouble with crack-cocaine and the country demanded harsher incarceration laws.

According to the Office of Justice Programs, the average cost to maintain just one prisoner is a whopping $22,650 a year. That is almost the median income of an American citizen. It is easy to see the difficulty of maintaining the expensive bill required to house inmates. A $40 billion tab, to be exact. How do we cope with this massive expense in a time where it is nearly impossible to balance the budget?  It is important to focus time, money, and effort into prisoner reentry programs in order to cut the cost of the $40 billion that the nation spends each year. Two-thirds of inmates in 2005, according to another Justice Department report, have had previous sentences. Through another report thrown together by the US Commission on Civil Rights in 1980, there were 19,000 drug related inmates, a number which dramitcally increased 250,000 by 2003.

So yes people, I am also advocating that crimes involving drugs should have lesser punishments. Am I an advocate for legalized drug use? No. Am I an advocate for anyone experimenting with drugs? No. Am I an advocate for taking the issue of addiction lightly? No. However, I am an advocate for saving money in a time where this nation needs it the most. The long and short? Non-violent crime punishments need to be revamped and make reentry programs readily available to free up the overcrowding of our prisons.

However, the question must be asked: can reentry and rehabilitation programs reduce recidivism?  Ultimately, can we keep these people from being re-arrested or are these re-entry programs allowing harden criminals back into society?

Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City, quoted in a recent New York Times article, thinks these men and women can be effectively released back into society “through improved reentry effort” Over the course of eleven years (between 1983 and 1994) a study was conducted between inmates who choose not to use a reentry program and a group of inmates that  did choose reenry. It concluded that about 6% fewer ex-inmates who utilized the employment program were not arrested or incarcerated compared to that of the group who did not use a reentry program. While it is small progress, we can’t kid ourselves. We are not going to reduce recidivism by 25% right away. It’s a program that needs to be implemented and mastered by professionals before we can get close to reducing it by that much. I think it is well worth the effort of the federal and state governments to utilize re-entry programs. If we can reduce recidivism by 6% annually within our first year, we’ve cut 2.5 billion dollars. That $2.5 billion can easily be used to teach scores of children in this country that struggle with basic math or even spent reinvesting in our nations crippling infrastructure.

In conclusion, whereas most inmates are repeat offenders or have had a previous prison sentence, there is a beacon light of hope. Through statistical data, reentry programs make a slight dent into that overwhelming recidivist inmate percentage. With better funding we could expect about a 15-20% reduction in recidivism. Any success in stopping “repeat offenders” is a victory, and with reduction in the jail time for minor drug offenses, we could be saving billions in a matter of a few short years. 

Robert Nickey

Contact Me at:

rob@strategicvictoryconsulting.com