Tanzina Vega: I'm Tanzina Vega, welcome back to The Takeaway. In the past decade, the jail population in the United States has fallen by 28%, but at the same time, jail budgets have increased nationwide. That's according to a new report from the Vera Institute of Justice, which found that local governments have been spending $25 billion every year to operate more than 3,000 jails in the country.

With the changing conversations regarding policing, incarceration, and the criminal justice system as a whole, we want to break down why we're seeing this disparity. Insha Rahman is the Vice President of advocacy and partnership at the Vera Institute of Justice. Insha, thanks for joining us.

Insha Rahman: Thanks for having me, Tanzina.

Tanzina Vega: That is an interesting disparity. Let's start with the counties that you studied and what some of the major findings were there when it came to jail populations?

Insha Rahman: We looked at jail budgets of about 50 counties across the country. We were trying to understand why we're seeing this phenomenon of we have fewer people behind bars, but we're still spending as much if not more money on the jail itself. Here's what we found, is basically, despite a decline in the number of people that were incarcerated, which is a good thing, we are doing nothing different when it comes to deciding on our budgets for jails across the country.

There's a number of forces behind this. First and foremost, there's this belief that we have that we can't move corrections jobs, we can't change how we do budgets at the local level. Every county, every city passes a budget each year, but what we see is that it's just assumed that the corrections budget will stay the same, even though huge changes are happening in our jails. Corrections officers actually make up about 73% of the jail budget itself. We spend very little when we do incarcerate people on services like medical care, or programs, or mental health care. We're really just paying for people's salaries and pensions, and that's what's driving this significant cost.

Tanzina Vega: I'm just curious there because if the populations in jails, as you have found has decreased, shouldn't the staffing follow?

Insha Rahman: You would think that, right? We do that in other sectors where we no longer are using a particular service, and so we right-size. We haven't done that for jails and prisons, and this time we focused on jails. It's a very interesting phenomenon because it really comes down to local budgets and the decisions that elected officials are making.

We worked once with an elected official who said to us, for every agency, like sanitation, they have to come in front of us during a hearing in the budget season and prove that they are in fact, picking up the trash, education. We require them to show that they are educating our children, likewise with transportation, healthcare, but with jails and police, in particular, it's actually us having to justify why we might right-size their budget. The reason we put out this report is because we wanted people to see across the country that if these 50 cities that we looked at if they were to actually right-size their correction staff to match the decline in the jail population, what they'd actually save annually is $2.2 billion. That is a lot of money at the local level that could be invested instead in housing, schools, education, parks, you name it.

Tanzina Vega: Who ultimately decides to write these budgets, if you will?

Insha Rahman: It's city council members and mayors. The reason we find this data, particularly hopefully, both interesting, outlandish, and inspiring people to get to work is that budgets are moral documents. They reflect our priorities. Every single city and town and county holds budget hearings, where there should be a reckoning about how are we spending our money.

In putting out this information, we really hope that people see it as a call to action to get involved and to say, "What are we doing in our local jail? Also, what's actually happening there to people who are incarcerated? Have we declined our use of incarceration?" A newsflash is most places that have reduced their use of incarceration have actually become more safe. Also, what are we doing with that money that we can save?

Tanzina Vega: We didn't really talk about this, but why is it that jail populations have been decreasing?

Insha Rahman: Jail populations have been decreasing around the country because we're finally beginning to understand that we have this excess of mass incarceration in this country. We have a little over 2 million people behind bars today. If we were to incarcerate at the rate of other countries that we think of as our peers would actually have no more than 360,000 people behind bars. We just incarcerate at a rate that is so much higher than anywhere else in this world.

The reason we're starting to see actually really significant declines in some places, New York City's jail population has declined by over 60% in the last decade, New Orleans has declined by 73%. We're seeing that because of changes on the ground, really thinking about the harms of incarceration because it is both the most expensive tool that we have in our criminal legal toolbox and the most harmful to people who are in the system.

Tanzina Vega: I'm wondering what your thoughts are on the new Biden-Harris administration, as they are now a couple of months in, and whether or not you think that at the federal level, there will be some consideration to this topic going forward, or is this something that you suspect will remain in the hands of the local municipalities to decide?

Insha Rahman: Certainly, it's a local issue, budgets, and how much each city and county spends on its jail, except for there's a great opportunity here. We're hearing rumor of a huge infrastructure package, a huge $3 trillion investment in the economy, in jobs, in communities coming out of the Biden-Harris administration in this Congress.

There's actually a great opportunity here to think about adjust-transition. That's a phrase that the labor movement has used for years, but adjust-transition for corrections staff and corrections officers in places like New York City where the jail population has declined so much in the past couple of decades, we now have close to two corrections officers hired for every one person that's incarcerated.

We have about 5,500 people behind bars, 10,000 corrections officers. Federal investment for adjust-transition for workforce development for these corrections officers would make sure that we're doing the right thing to right-size the staffing for the jail and significantly decrease the cost that New York City is spending and that's $2.3 billion, yes, that's billion a year just on the jail alone.

We need that investment, and that signal from the Biden-Harris administration, that we can do adjust-transition that we care about people and their well-being, but we can't have people in jobs that no longer are needed, and that are in fact harmful and too costly to the rest of us.

Tanzina Vega: Insha Rahman is the Vice President of advocacy and partnership at the Vera Institute of Justice. Insha, thanks so much.

Insha Rahman: Thank you, Tanzina.

 

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