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NY pays out big bucks for prisons

Published:Tuesday | October 1, 2013 | 12:00 AM
In this March 16, 2011, file photo, inmates file out of the prison bakery at the Rikers Island jail in New York after working the morning shift. A recent report issued by the Independent Budget Office found it cost $167,731 in 2012 to house 12,287 daily New York City inmates. New York City pays almost as much to jail an inmate in a year as it would to pay a student's four years of tuition at a private college. - AP

NEW YORK (AP):

New York is indeed an expensive place, but experts say that alone doesn't explain a recent report that found the city's annual cost per inmate was US $167,731 last year, nearly as much as it costs to pay for four years of tuition at an Ivy League university.

They say a big part of it is due to New York's most notorious lockup, Rikers Island, and the costs that go along with staffing, maintaining, and securing a facility that is literally an island unto itself.

"Other cities don't have Rikers Island," said Martin F. Horn, who in 2009 resigned as the city's correction commissioner, noting that hundreds of millions of dollars are spent a year to run the 400-acre island in the East River next to the runways of LaGuardia Airport that has 10 jail facilities, thousands of staff, and its own, power plant and bakery.

The city's Independent Budget Office annual figure of US$167,731, which equates to about US$460 per day for the 12,287 average daily New York City inmates last year, was based on about $2 billion in total operating expenses for the Department of Correction, which included salaries and benefits for staff, judgments, and claims as well as debt service for jail construction and repairs.

But there are particularly expensive costs associated with Rikers.

The department says it spends $30.3 million annually alone on transportation costs, running three bus services that usher inmates to and from court throughout the five boroughs, staff from a central parking lot to Rikers jails and visitors to and around the island. There were 261,158 inmates delivered to court last year.