The Cost of Justice

Cost of Justice

Kyle M. Anderson

Introduction

What is the cost of justice? How can we even qualify that? Justice should and must be served at any cost. There is no cost/benefit analysis that can be conducted that will truly be representative of  the true cost of justice. We can look at the cost of running our jails and prisons. We can examine the cost in dollars and man-power in our court systems. We can study the perceived benefits and social cost of our system. We can quantify and plug in statistics until we are blue in the face, yet we still have not defined the cost. Has justice been served? That is the only true cost/benefit analysis that matters. God demands that justice be served, Deuteronomy 16:19-21 “Do not pervert justice or show partiality. Do not accept a bribe, for a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise and twists the words of the innocent. Follow justice and justice alone, so that you may live and possess the land the Lord your God is giving you.” (Holy Bible, New International Version (NIV), 2001).

As we can never fulfill perfect justice here on earth and since we must quantify the cost of justice in terms we can define I shall examine the cost in dollars, man-power, and the social cost of operating our justice system.

The Cost: defined

             To define the cost we must define the terms we are using. We have several costs involved. First is the monetary cost: the cost in dollars. Second we have the man-power cost: the amount of time our corrections, courts and legal personnel invest in serving justice. Third we have the societal cost: the cost that society bears in the confidence of our system and the feelings of security it brings.

The Benefit: defined

            To define the benefit we need to clarify what we define as the benefits of our system. There are several factors to examine in defining the benefits. First and primary is that justice is served. Second; provide a safe and secure environment to incarcerate the offenders. Third; remand the offender away from the public in order to rehabilitate them prior to release so that they will not re-offend.

The Cost/Benefits Analysis

Cost

            Monetary Cost: In fiscal year 2010, North Carolina spent $1,095,395,000 in direct prison costs, $109,272,000 in prison costs outside the corrections budget, for a total taxpayer amount of $1,204,667,000 or slightly over 9% of the state budget (Henrichson, 2012). Of the forty states that participated in the VERA study the total expenditures were: $38,903,304.000 or approximately 13.9% of the budget (Henrichson, 2012).

            Man-Power Cost: The cost of man-power is to broad a spectrum to quantify. Countless hours are spent by criminal justice personnel in running our system. Form the police officer on the street to the corrections officer in the prison there are thousands of people behind the scenes that the public never sees.

            Societal Cost: When the public loses confidence in the integrity of the system there is an unidentifiable societal cost. Cases such as the OJ Simpson murder trial and the more recent Casey Anthony trial erode the public’s confidence that justice can be served. Both of these cases cost the tax payers and extreme amount of money for negligible results.

Benefit.

Justice Served: How can we quantify if justice was served? The simplistic model would say the guilty were convicted and the innocent were freed. Overall we do a pretty good job of that. A study conducted in 1996 suggested that the number of innocents convicted of serious crimes was estimated conservatively at 0.5 percent. Of the 1,993,880 convictions for index crimes in 1990 that means nearly 10,000 innocents were wrongfully convicted (Huff, 1996). Still that is a 99.5% success rate and we are only human.

            Safe and Secure: In terms of safety and security of our jails and prisons no other country can even come close to our system. So we succeed in this area, but is it worth the over $30,000 we spend per inmate. Yes, when inmates are in our custody they are our responsibility.

            Remand/Rehabilitate: This is another are to diverse to define effectively. The national recidivism rate is around 70% (Bureau of Justice Statitics, 2012). This would suggest that perhaps we are failing in the rehabilitation of the inmates.               

Analysis

The benefit is much harder to determine. Simply in terms of cost per inmate, with the 2010 prison population in North Carolina, (not counting prison inmates held in local jails), of 40,116 (Guerino, 2011) the cost per inmate is $30,029. Unfortunately this still does not count the whole cost as there are many prison inmates housed in local jails at a cost to the taxpayer as well.

Summery

            It is my belief that there can be no realistic cost/benefit analysis of Justice. God demands us to seek justice and God is just. We cannot achieve perfection but a 99.5% conviction is pretty good. The cost of justice is high, but the cost of injustice is even higher. 2 Chronicles 19:7 "Now let the fear of the LORD be on you. Judge carefully, for with the LORD our God there is no injustice or partiality or bribery.” (Holy Bible, New International Version (NIV), 2001)

Bibliography

Bureau of Justice Statitics. (2012). Recidivism.

Guerino, P. H. (2011). Prisoners in 2010. U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Henrichson, C. a. (2012). The Price of Prisons. VERA Institute of Justice.

Holy Bible, New International Version (NIV). (2001). Grand Rapids: Zondervan.

Huff, C. (1996). Convicted But Innocent: Wrongful Conviction and Public Policy. Sage.