My friend Dee Marquart has a blog that mentions the cost of a prisoner in California. She discusses punishment verse rehabilitation. I don’t care about either, its up to the felon. Personal responsibility is the issue and there is no training for it.
Dee has a number $31,000 per year. I don't know the exact numbers, but $31,000 a year to keep a felon off the street seems cheap to me. I make no distinction in this as it relates to the type of crime; that subject only obscures the issue. The total cost of law enforcement, the criminal part of the judicial system and the direct functional costs to society from crime are very high. Each year that a felon is kept from being involved in crime can be weighed against the social cost of crime.
While a drop in crime seldom leads to a drop in the social costs of police and courts, such costs do come down in the long run. Japan, Israel and other low crime societies have very low costs for police and criminal justice and they should be the basis for comparison.
If the felon goes straight when he gets out of prison, it is most likely because of the effects of aging ... just plain sociology of aging. If he is easily caught for a new crime, which is usually the case because parolees are immediate suspects, so much the better. Recidivism is high, but recidivists are usually caught quickly before they run up new social costs for their crime.
Keeping 100,000 felons off the street for one year in California is certainly worth $3 billion in the amount of crime the felons don't get to commit.
The numbers work out just for murder alone. If the life of each person murdered is $3 million (based on 9/11 payouts) and the trial for murder costs several $ million, it is obvious that just from murderers (non-family killings) kept off the street we get an economic bonus.