Prison For Pennies On The Dollar

Prison For Pennies On The Dollar

Common sense tells me that crime would be lower if there were fewer criminals running around loose on the street. I’m sure you feel the same way, too. 

Across the U.S.A. there are millions of criminals out on the street instead of spending time behind bars because they either were never prosecuted, or were given probation (or perhaps a light sentence), or who got paroled when perhaps they should have been kept locked up. But that’s just life. And that’s the way it is.  

Until it isn’t.

That is to say, maybe we can change things. Maybe we can undo that and do things differently. But how would we go about it?

In answering that, let me note that the State of Alabama just committed itself to spending $1.3 billion to build two new prisons. ¹ Each one will house 4,000 inmates.

Similarly, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has just committed itself to spending $950 million to purchase some buildings which, up until now, have been used as immigration detention facilities. ² These immigration facilities which DHS is purchasing already contain 2,644 beds, however, so this move by DHS will simply be an administrative shuffle between government agencies. Notwithstanding that fact, each of these expenditures does reflect the cost of incarceration today, and we can use that as a way of estimating the price tag for further prison reform.

Now, when it comes to correctional reform and improvement, these expenditures constitute a good start, but we need to do something more. Yet, how can we afford that?

Now, when it comes to correctional reform and improvement, these expenditures constitute a good start, but we need to do something more. Yet, how can we afford that?

Reconfiguring them as living quarters should not take too much money. For the accommodations can be Spartan in character. (In a prison, they always are.) After all, we don’t have to provide inmates with comfortable motel accommodations. We pretty much just have to keep them warm, safe, and dry. So why not simply keep them in a box? 

Mind you, that being said, conditions don’t have to be downright harsh. The roof of the top layer of several of them stacked together can be used for recreation (e.g., a basketball court). And several of them can be connected to make a gym, a movie theater, a library, or a kitchen and dining facilities, or visitation facilities, or be put to other good uses, such as a prison chapel, or classrooms and trade schools.

All told, if the installation of the plumbing and bathroom fixtures can be completed for about $2,500, along with the wiring and electrical fixtures installed for about $1,000, and with drywall, insulation, paint, duct work, windows, doors, and matting along the floor completed for roughly $5,000 more, then a used shipping container (40 feet long), one which has been reconfigured for human habitation, should cost around $8,500 when ready.

On top of that, many of the inmates whom I encountered when I worked for the Department of Corrections in Arizona had skills in construction, and they worked on maintenance and remodeling of the prison. Such inmates could be used for pennies on the dollar.

The figures I gave above for funding all this would probably come in low compared to what they would really be if regular contractors were used. But using inmate labor instead of regular contractors whenever possible should help keep the cost of this project down to a minimum.
Now, that being said, I can see where some might object on the grounds that this could depress wages in construction. But what if we did this: Budget for the prevailing wage, but pay the vast majority of it to a victims’ compensation fund. That way, construction wages wouldn’t be depressed, and at the same time we could have inmates giving up almost all of what they would earn at a job on the outside in order to assist victims of crime.

Given the fact that a small container ship should be able to hold about 250 of these units, the total cost for this project (the ship plus the containers themselves: i.e., the housing units) should be around $7,500,000. With that in mind, let us also consider the fact that there would be no land purchase required for this floating prison; it could be tied up at a mooring place along a lake or river, preferably near a town which could

provide the staff needed to operate it. And remember this: State-occupied land pays no real estate taxes. So once a prison is established on a certain piece of land, the county government would then have to get the tax revenue which it would ordinarily receive from that piece of land from somewhere else. Not so with a floating prison, however, for it takes no piece of real estate off the property tax rolls.

When fully set, the container ship prison could house around 7,500 inmates for a cost of just over $1,000 per inmate. This is in stark contrast to the brick-and-mortar route which the State of Alabama has chosen to take to the tune of over $150,000 per inmate or which the U.S. DHS proposal will pursue for a cost of over $350,000 per inmate.

In other words, with that same $1.3 billion which the State of Alabama has committed to incarcerating 8,000 inmates, a state could house over one million inmates instead. Stated in more practical terms, a large, industrialized state such as Illinois, which currently holds 30,000 inmates behind bars, ⁶ could establish room to incarcerate another 100,000+ inmates aboard ship (15 ships total) for $112,500,000.

To put this in perspective, the entire budget of the State of Illinois is about $56 billion. So, in other words, for approximately 1/500th of the current budget of the State of Illinois (0.2% of the budget), the state could increase its housing space for inmates from 30,000 to around 130,000. Double it, and the state could increase its available inmate space to 230,000 (nearly 8 times what it is now) while increasing its budget by less than one-half of one percent for the overall purchase. And I think I speak well within the mark when I say that this would have the potential to produce a meaningful decrease in the rate of crime in any state.

This could help a state encourage its businesses to expand within the state itself instead of seeking greener pastures elsewhere, for the crime rate would become significantly lower, and it could help with any effort to market a state as being a great place to establish a new business or to relocate an existing one to. Furthermore, home owners could see the equity in their property increase as demand for housing in their state increases. And as the population increases to meet business expansion, so would the tax base, and more revenue would flow into the state treasury. In addition, one would expect insurance rates to drop if the rate of auto thefts and burglaries were to decrease substantially.

Granted, operational costs of the state prison system would increase. There’s no avoiding that. But with respect to that, there are several things to consider.

First of all, the aforementioned increase in revenue for the state would have at least some tendency to offset the increased cost of the penal system. Second, as time goes on, more and more offenders will move out of the state to avoid a system which virtually guarantees their reincarceration the next time they get caught. And thus, paradoxically, a state which sees an initial increase in its inmate population under this system could wind up decreasing its inmate population over the long term.

Third, this entire program can be implemented in incremental fashion. That is to say, a state could begin with one container ship with a small number of containers onboard and then see how this goes. No one has to make the $1.3 billion commitment to prison expansion which the State of Alabama made and then just hope it works out. We can let the system prove itself first at each step along the way. And if it doesn’t prove itself, we can end the expansion of the program right then and there with the first unit and put the ship itself back on the market for used container ships.

Fourth, for the most part, the provision of food, housing, clothing, and medical care for the inmates will not constitute much of a new expense for the state because most of the inmates will have already been heavily dependent on state assistance from the time they became adults, anyway, and many of them even since childhood. Seen in that light, the so-called increased expenses will really amount to nothing more than payment transfers from one part of the state budget (e.g., Medicaid and other forms of assistance) to a different column (the prison health system, etc.).  

Fifth, the ship’s engines could provide all the electricity and heating that would be needed, thereby saving on those expenses, and they might also be able to provide for the ship’s own water filtration, purification, and sewage treatment system. On that note, let us also consider the fact that since the ship would not have to sail to any destination, the routine maintenance of much of its equipment could largely be eliminated.

Then there’s the security aspects to consider. To prevent escapes, all you really have to do is to shine lights on the sides at night and train security cameras on them.   

So, there’s a lot to be said for incarcerating large numbers of offenders on a long-term basis, and there is less in the way of drawbacks than we might at first imagine. Yet the benefit of just locking up all the offenders isn’t the only thing to pursue here. There is also behavioral health to consider. 

For instance, one of the main challenges facing counselors in behavioral health in a correctional setting is the task of breaking an inmate’s long-standing bad habits. For although an inmate addicted to drugs or alcohol can be started down a better path while he is incarcerated, immediately upon his release, he can go right straight back to his old buddies, his old habits, and his old criminal activities (e.g., armed robberies and burglaries to fund his addictions, etc.) which got him into prison in the first place.

One of the benefits of switching to low-budget, long-term mass incarceration is the fact that for an increased period of time, a counselor can strictly control the environment in which an offender is living. For a bed will always be available to keep him in the system a little longer, a place where the counselor can keep an eye on him, and where the counselor can even control who he interacts with on a social basis, let alone control whether he spends any money on drugs.

This can be very important, as I learned from my own personal experience. You see, prior to my retirement, I spent a few years practicing pharmacy in a prison setting, mostly with the Arizona Department of Corrections, but also for a few months on a contract with the California system. And from my experience I gained a perspective on this which I would not have had otherwise.  

For instance, at one time I was working at a prison in northern Arizona (Winslow, specifically). ⁷  And one morning we released a guy who had been paroled. But there were certain strict conditions attached to his release. For instance, he was forbidden to go into bars.  

Later that same day, just before we left at the end of our shift, the pharmacy where I worked got a call from the prison down in Tucson, about a six-hour drive away. The Tucson facility wanted to know if we could check his medical record to see what medications he had been on because as it turned out, the moment he got back to Tucson, he went straight into a bar, got drunk, and got into a brawl. He was then arrested by officers who immediately determined that he was out on parole and was violating the terms of it, and they had put him back in the slammer. So suddenly, less than half a day after he had been released, he was right back in the system again. This would not have happened if the system had had the resources it would have needed to keep him locked up longer.

What this means is that giving the behavioral health counselors the tools that they need (e.g., more available space to keep inmates from going back to their old habits) can not only decrease crime, it can also decrease the cost of running the criminal justice system by decreasing criminal court costs, prison costs, the costs of a probation and parole system, etc.

You see, chronic offenders do not see the threat of doing time in prison the same way you and I do. They know they are chronic offenders. They know they are going to get

caught again and will be back in prison soon after they get done serving the current sentence for which they are doing time. For they know they are going to continue their criminal behavior.

A chaplain at one of the prisons I worked at once quipped that many of the inmates were serving a life sentence on the installment basis: a few years here, a few years there, and then the whole thing all over again. And they have come to accept the fact that the chance of incarceration is just one of those things in life which they will have to deal with if they are going to continue living their lifestyle.

In other words, the threat of doing time in prison is just a cost of doing business to them, and they treat it in much the same way that a guy who owns a pizza place treats his electric bill. It’s just one of those things that he has to take into account when it comes to deciding whether he will stay in the same line of work or not. So, giving behavioral health counselors the tools they need to provide their services with---in this case, the ability to hold an offender in the system a little longer in order to control his environment and seriously break his old habits---would be another worthy reason to provide low-budget prison facilities en masse.

Look at it from this angle: When it comes to contemplating whether to commit a particular crime or not, certain things go through the mind of an inmate: the chance that he’ll receive a plea-bargain with probation, the chance of his receiving a lengthy sentence or a short one, the chance of his getting out early on parole, etc. And he usually has this all thought out in very thorough, meticulous detail long before he even gets out of prison from serving his current term.

One problem with an inmate’s approach will lie in the fact that in terms of emotional maturity, many inmates are still stuck in junior year high school. I remember commenting once to one of the prison counselors at a minimum-security yard that I felt like I was on staff at a high school and that the inmates consisted mostly of 16-year-old kids stuck inside 32-year-old bodies. He emphatically agreed with me. After all, at a minimum-security yard, the inmates commonly have the exact same values system as juniors in high school: The only three things that really matter in life are fast cars, fast women, and the next thing that will get you high. And that’s it. Nothing else matters, period. And at other prisons (medium and maximum security), the only difference which I could see was that the inmates there also crave power, whether for themselves or for their gang.

What their emotional immaturity leads to is the fact that even though the offender knows he will be caught again eventually (because he will continue his life of crime), he will think in an unrealistic, emotionally immature manner about whether he will be caught “this time” as he contemplates whether to commit his next crime. And so, despite the fact that he will have been in and out of the system multiple times, he will conclude, due to his emotional immaturity, that he will get away with it one more time. And so, he will commit another offense, and he will face the justice system once again.

As he goes through all the various things to consider in his mind, do you suppose the chances that he will commit another crime are exactly the same if he knows with some degree of certainty that he will get time in prison as opposed to probation, or that he will receive a lengthy sentence as opposed to a short one? As he ponders this, what will be the effect of him knowing that the system will always have room for him inside a prison? And as you think about this question, bear in mind that every day in most criminal courtrooms around the country, each judge receives a notice as to how many beds the state prison system has available for new inmates that day. And any responsible judge will keep this in mind when it comes to deciding whether to give an offender incarceration as opposed to probation. And the convict knows this.

Now, what happens to this equation if there isn’t room for even one more inmate in the state prison system today, and that there is always overcrowding … and the inmate knows it? And the inmate knows that the judge likewise knows it? What happens to the inmate’s cost/benefit analysis then?

It changes suddenly, and pretty dramatically, and for the worse, not the better, at least as far as we’re concerned, because he knows that there is an excellent chance that he will receive probation instead of incarceration. But what if it’s the case instead that within his mind, he hears the system say, “We will always have room for you,” and in his mind he sees the prison doors open wide for him? Bear in mind that he would do anything to avoid that scenario.

Come to think of it, he would then start to think of just moving out of state altogether, would he not? So, although a state may incur a substantial increase in the day-to-day cost of running its prison system when it first starts incarcerating more offenders, those increased costs may decrease gradually because in time, a number of inmates will have either left the state or will have given up early on living a life of crime. Furthermore, increased revenues from more businesses and people moving into the state would offset at least some of the costs of incarceration. This could start to snowball, in fact, as the increase in business revenues and population takes on a life of its own and encourages even more growth and development.

One other thing to consider in terms of cost, oddly enough, stems from the fact that the sides of shipping containers effectively constitute good advertising space. Since we would want these prisons to be located near population centers with enough people to staff them, it would stand to reason that mooring them along roadways and near bridges with high traffic volume would be a good thing to do. The longer sides of each container would be approximately the same size as a billboard, and it would not be difficult to imagine the sides of each prison carrying a few different messages, especially if several containers would be combined to form large messages: e.g., “Denny’s 2N” (Exit 2 North), “Hampton Inn 3S” (Exit 3 South), “Walmart 5N” (Exit 5 North). Three or four such messages might occupy a given side of a container ship.

Billboards, I should note, rent out for widely varying prices, ranging anywhere $1,500 to $30,000 per four-week period. ⁸ A prison moored along a river at a high-traffic bridge would be a good place for a billboard, so let’s assume each container onboard the ship could bring in $20,000 per period, maybe more, whether a container has a message of its own or is combined with other containers to form a large message. Accordingly, twelve containers stacked together could bring in $240,000 to the state treasury. And it may be possible that each side would be that valuable, though for some of the prisons, only one side would have good visibility for traffic driving by.

That being said, assuming the containers are stacked four-high, and assuming that each ship can hold at least eight rows per side, then even a ship which has only one side that will have a good facing toward traffic would have the potential to bring in at least $500,000 in revenue for the state every four weeks. That might not be a king’s ransom in today’s money. But when you take into account the fact that as I said, much of the money spent on running the prison would simply constitute taking money out of one column (the state’s welfare budget) and placing it in a different column (the state’s correctional budget), the $500,000 in revenue every four weeks (for each of 15 ships in Illinois, for example) would constitute a welcome addition to the state’s treasury and would help defray the cost of this endeavor. (For 15 ships, this would amount to $7,500,000 per month.)

This overall approach would also make life a whole lot easier for a judge if the judge wouldn’t have to worry about giving the last prison bed for the day to a burglar when the next monster coming into his courtroom might be a child molester. Likewise for the prosecutor, fighting crime could be a whole lot easier if there were multiple penalty options rather than few.

Will this help lower crime, then? Well, yes and no. It will certainly lower crime in the first state which implements a system such as this. The only problem is, it will probably simply transfer the problem across state lines to a state which does not yet have this system, for that is where the offender will go. But that can change in a heartbeat, especially when a legislator seeking reelection puts this issue before the voters and says he has just introduced a bill to follow this approach, and when he states further that the people of his state should not be left holding the bag when they

can see that the people of all the states around them are already enjoying the benefits of doing things this way, and that a bunch of loose-on-the-street convicts are already spilling over from those other states into theirs.

This can change an inmate’s perception of the penalty for committing his next crime from being one that has just a possibility of incarceration to being one that has a virtual certainty of incarceration, and for a long term instead of a short one. In other words, it would no longer be just the possible, academic penalty that would occupy his mind, for there would be a substantial shift in his perception as to whether he really would face that penalty at all.

All that being said, it doesn’t take a genius to realize that keeping people safe from criminals for pennies on the dollar as compared to doing things the way they are done now can become mighty popular on election day. And to do that, we simply have to have a new way to approach incarceration. These days the prevailing mentality is that a state should lock up as many convicts as need be in order keep the people from getting up in arms about crime, but no more inmates than that, says the conventional wisdom, because it simply costs way too much money to lock up all the ones who should be in prison.

I think we can do better than that, however. When it comes to fighting crime, we don’t have to take it lying down. So I suggest we use the old-fashioned approach, but with a new twist on the way that has always worked in the past: Throw ’em in the box!

Of course, some will take the exact opposite approach. In its most extreme form, the opposite approach would entail abolishing all prisons, period. In its lesser form it would call for decriminalizing all so-called victimless crimes: prostitution and narcotics use being first and foremost among them.

I take it that for the most part, however, those who advocate such positions have never worked in a prison. The reason I say this is that those who espouse such positions commonly envision themselves saving society an extraordinary sum of money through their approach, with no real harm to society as a consequence.

It just doesn’t work that way in real life, though. Sure, many inmates who are doing time are only in for a drug offense this one time. But this has to be viewed in context. For instance, there may not have been enough evidence to convict on a burglary charge, or on a charge for some other serious offense. The drug charge may have been the only one the prosecutor could secure a conviction on.

I remember that at one prison where I worked I was told that the average inmate had already received six felony convictions before being sent to the state prison system for the first time. Prior to a seventh felony conviction, an offender would be sent to a county jail even on a felony conviction, if he would be incarcerated at all.

Felonies, of course, are not petty offenses. They are the serious offenses: those punishable by more than one year in prison (murder, rape, armed robbery, etc.). So, in other words, the appearance that society is wasting money on locking up those who have committed so-called victimless crimes can be deceptive. If you had told me while I was working as a prison pharmacist that none of the inmates who were in on drug charges alone were not also career burglars, career car thieves, career hold-up men, or chronic sex offenders I would have died laughing.

I suggest we take a more realistic approach and recognize how much harm we can prevent if we keep the bad apples isolated from the law-abiding people of the community.

Also, stop and think about what this means in terms of quality-of-life issues. That is to say, in this piece I have spelled out various benefits to be had by doing things this way. But I would like to challenge you to stop and think about what this would mean if we really got serious about fighting crime.

By that I mean this: One of my aunts had a friend who had been born around 1895 or 1900. And I remember this friend of my aunt’s talking one day about the good times which she and her friends would have when they would ride the streetcar down on the South Side of Chicago to go out and have a good time. They would then come home at about 10:00 at night, again on the streetcar, and they would each walk home unescorted from where they had gotten off. This was just east of the neighborhood where my family had lived up until I was four years old: Little Flower parish. That parish is closed now, but if you’re familiar with the South Side, think 79th and Ashland. Bear in mind as well that there were very few streetlights at the time, and the ones which did exist were very dim.

I know that whole story sounds just crazy, but that’s not even the most amazing part. Rather, the most amazing part, you see, is that these young women didn’t even think anything of it, and never gave it so much as a second thought. To them, the things they were doing were just normal, things that were to be expected. There was no need to be brave, no need to be daring, or any of that. That was just routine life, business as usual.

Try that today! Hah! Most women today are afraid to go out alone anywhere after dark, even if they are driving their own car instead of walking alone to and from a bus stop. And rightfully so.

My point here is this: In addition to the academic points about how society would benefit from an approach like this, there are also the quality-of-life issues to consider: a better society, one in which its citizens will have to endure fewer rapes, fewer burglaries, fewer hold-ups and auto thefts, etc.

At this point, allow me to return to a discussion of cost once more. We can discuss fighting crime all we want in terms of dollars and cents. But it is the human cost which we must focus on most of all. Namely, what would you be willing to pay for a society that had one less rape in it, one less murder, one less child molestation?

Mass incarceration can give you what you want. Are you willing to pay the price for it? And would the answer to that question depend on whether there is a system which can offer you that for pennies on the dollar?

I can’t promise you a trip to Nirvana from all of this, and I can’t promise you that high-crime neighborhoods will return to the way they were 100+ years ago. But we do know from the historical record that life once used to be just exactly the way I have described it here, even in our largest cities. And how far back we can get toward that era and that culture, I do not know. But I do know that we can at least start to make our way back. Certainly, at a minimum, we can stop going the wrong way, and we can stop making things worse instead of better.

We can start a new movement for doing this nationwide, in fact, if we will just take the lead. For if it’s a success, others will follow. We can be pretty much sure of that.

At the same time, we can know that if we don’t take the lead and get this whole thing started, and we wind up suffering the consequences of our failure to do so, we will have only ourselves to blame for what follows. So maybe the time to get started on this is now.

Right now.

ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤThe author, Larry Joyce, is a retired dual professional: a pharmacist and an attorney. He has worked on-staff as a prison pharmacist for the Arizona Department of Corrections and on a contract for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. He also worked on Capitol Hill in Washington as the Legislative Director of the Juvenile Justice Reform Project, which was funded by a grant from the United States Department of Justice (DOJ).

ㅤㅤㅤHe currently lives in Poplar Grove, IL. He may be contacted via the Contact tab on his website: StarOfBethlehemDecoded.com. This essay itself may be located there from his Home page under the tab “Mr. Joyce’s Other Writings”.

Mr. Joyce's Other Writings