Everyone knows that New York is an expensive place to live. But, I bet most people didn't know that it is expensive just to be an inmate. That's right, last year "the city's annual cost per inmate was $167,731," which is about how much tuition would cost to attend an Ivy League school for four years. New York's most infamous facility, Rikers Island, could be to blame. It costs a tremendous amount of money to staff and maintain an island. New York's entire Department of Correction spent about $2 billion last year . Rikers Island spends $30.3 million annually just to cover the cost of transportation.
Wow! For me, this is hard to understand because $2 billion is such an enormous dollar amount and it is hard to wrap my mind over exactly how much money that is, and exact what you could buy with it. However, it does seem like too much money is being spent in New York to house inmates. Annually, it costs $167,731 per inmate. Some people, even families, don't even make that much in terms of their annual salary. It probably isn't as easy as it seems, but to me it seems like New York could easily cut down their spending by a couple of thousand dollars a year. Imagine what else New York could do with that money. Let's pretend that a meal costs $5. If New York cut back their spending on inmates by $100,000 out of their $2 billion dollar annual spending. New York could buy 20,000 meals. By doing further math I calculated that they could feed almost 55 people a meal everyday of the year. New York could feed the homeless person that is on the street corner, or the 2 year old baby in a family that only makes $40,000 a year and has 3 other kids. It may not seem like such a huge change when you take into account the total population of New York, but making any change is still a change.
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