Basic Prison & Jail Fact Sheet

State Prisons:

• It costs about $32,000 to maintain a prisoner in a New York State prison for a year.

• In January 1973 there were 12,500 persons in the State prison system. Today there are over 70,000.

• From 1981 through 1996, the State added 39,651 beds to its prison system, at an average construction cost of $100,000, for a total capital expense, not counting debt service, of nearly $4 billion dollars.

• The operating budget for the state prisons has increased from about $450 million in fiscal year 1982-83 to more than $1.8 billion today.

• At the end of the 1997 legislative session, state policymakers approved 3100 new prison spaces, all double celled, virtually all expected to hold inmates accused of disciplinary infractions, who will be kept together in their cells for at least 23 hours per day. It cost approximately $300 million to build these new facilities.

• In his fiscal year 1999-2000 budget, Governor Pataki has proposed allocating $360 million to build two new double-celled prisons that will each house 1,500 inmates. It will cost the state nearly $100 million every year to operate these maximum security facilities.

• In recent years the State has used more and more prison space for drug and other non-violent offenders and less for violent offenders. In 1980, 886 drug offenders were sent to State prison, 11% of the total court commitments for that year. By 1998 the number of drug offenders sent to State prison had reached 9,063, 46.6% of the total. By contrast: the number of violent offenders sent to State prison in 1983 was 7,926, 63% of total court commitments; in 1998 the number of violent offenders going upstate was 5,385, 27.7% of the total.

• In 1998 alone, the Second Felony Offender Law -- which was amended slightly in 1995 by the governor and legislature -- required prison terms for 7,147 low-level offenders, most of whom were minor drug offenders. It will cost about $230 million per year just to maintain these people in the state's prison system.

City Jails:

• It costs the city about $64,000 a year to keep an inmate in a New York City Jail.

• In 1980 there were about 7,000 inmates in City jails. In 1991, there were 22,600. Today there are about 17,800.

• The City's Department of Correction's expenditures grew from $189 million in 1982 to about $800 million for 1998.

February 1999