NYC Jail Inmate Costs Rose Amid Pandemic Incarceration Drop

NEW YORK CITY — A years-long low number of inmates in New York City's jails during the pandemic didn't keep costs and violence down, according to a new report.

In fact, taxpayers ending up paying 30 percent more per inmate over fiscal year 2020 — a span that also saw a nearly-identical rise in violence within jails.

“The cost to incarcerate a single individual on Rikers has exploded even as our jail population remains near historic lows – yet rates of violence continue to climb," Comptroller Scott Stringer, who issued the report Wednesday, said in a statement. "That means we are spending more and more money to incarcerate fewer and fewer people and reducing the safety of both officers and people in custody in the process. We must reimagine our criminal legal system, dramatically reduce the pretrial population, and invest our taxpayer dollars in the resources and programs—from housing to health care—that prevent incarceration in the first place."

Stringer's report placed the city's Department of Correction on his "Agency Watch List" for the fourth straight year.

Watch list agencies spend large and growing sums on "meager" results, as the report states.

The report's central finding on cost was that jails spent an average of $447,337 to incarcerate a single inmate over the 2020 fiscal year. The same cost was $334,864 during the previous year, according to the report.

In total, it has more than doubled since the 2015 fiscal year, data shows.

The skyrocketing cost is more striking when the year's overall decline in jail population is taken into account. Bail reform followed by the coronavirus pandemic both drove down the jail's admissions to 26 percent below the previous year's, the report states.

And the city's daily average of inmates has been on a steep decline in general since at least 2010, according to the comptroller's office. The daily average that year was 13,049 compared to 5,841 during the 2020 fiscal year.

Jail budgets rose, rather than fell, during that same time, according to the comptroller's office.

Fight and assault infractions rose 27 percent and total violent incident spiked 16 percent, according to the report. Assaults on staff also 26 percent, according to the report.

The number of inmates with a mental health issues rose as well.

During the 2020 fiscal year, 46 percent of inmates had a mental health diagnosis, the report states. The percentage jumped to 54 percent in the first four months of the 2021 fiscal year, according to the report.

"The share of the jail population with a serious mental health diagnosis also increased from 14.8 percent in FY 2020 to 17 percent in the beginning of FY 2021," the report states.

"Now is the time to re-think our public safety paradigm," the report states. "We must redirect resources to programming and treatment that can help prevent incarceration, reduce violence within the jails, and help people succeed in their communities after they leave."