© Joshua Lott / Reuters
"For every dollar in corrections spending, there's another 10 dollars of other types of costs to families, children and communities that nobody sees because it doesn't end up on a state budget," Michael McLaughlin, a doctoral student and certified public accountant, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
McLaughlin is the lead researcher for "The Economic Burden of Incarceration in the US," a study recently conducted by Washington University in St. Louis. Along with a team of researchers, he and Carrie Pettus-Davis, a co-director for the Smart Decarceration Initiative and director of the Concordance Institute for Advancing Social Justice, both Washington University-based, determined that the "annual economic burden" of US incarceration is an estimated $1.2 trillion, according to The Source, a Washington University publication.
The $1.2 trillion figure is nearly 6 percent of GDP and is 11 times the cost of what governments pay for corrections, the study reports, based on 22 costs from three categories: "costs of corrections," "costs borne by incarcerated persons," and "costs borne by families, children, and communities."
Comment: Prisons have openly given up the pretense of being 'correctional institutions'. They are for-profit enterprises housing a huge population of slave labor. Social costs don't enter into this psychopathic equation at all.