Reallocating Prison Expenses to Fund Stronger Probation and Parole Programs

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2009 NIJ Conference 2009
Adam Gelb
Director of the Public Safety Performance Project, Pew Center on the States

Adam Gelb: What we've found — and this is not a surprise to the people in the field but, I think, to the media and the public it was, and that is that we're paying 22 times more per day to have somebody in prison than on probation. So, it's about 78 dollars a day per prisoner and about 3 dollars and 42 cents per day for somebody on probation. And so, one of the issues that that's really raised is, you know: What would it look like if we spent six or nine or 13 dollars per day on somebody on probation? You could sort of double or triple or quadruple the level of intensity of services and supervision that offenders are getting and still do it at a tiny fraction of the cost of a prison cell.

NIJ: And then at the end of the panel, you summarized three things that — you kind of heard the themes going through the panelists. Do you want to tell us again about those three things you saw?

Gelb: Sure. The first is that problems in this field are as much problems of management as they are of policy. At this point, we know pretty well what needs to be done; we're just not doing it. And systems and leaders need to step up and implement the things that work.

The second is that the huge increase in imprisonment that we've seen has mostly been caused by policy choices that states have made. It's not been driven by a huge increase in crime. Specifically over the last 10 years or so, crime has been dropping. And it's not due to these broad social and economic forces that are really outside the scope or control of government; they are decisions — sentencing decisions, release decisions, other policy decisions — that states and other localities have made about who goes to prison and how long they stay. And that's what's driven the population up and the costs.

And then, thirdly, that the debate between treatment and punishment is really kind of an inside-the-beltway argument; it's not a real argument on the streets where the panel is working, in the state capitals, in the neighborhoods where offenders are being supervised. They know, at this point, that we need to do both treatment and punishment — that the best way to reduce recidivism and hold offenders accountable is to combine carrots and sticks.