Economic Influences

Economic Influences In the current budgetary environment, it is difficult to justify any increase in expenditures. In order to do this, especially to the public audience, it is necessary to offer a cost-benefit analysis. In the case of prison treatment and rehabilitation programs, there is a clear cost-benefit argument to be made. When making an economic argument, trade-offs and opportunity cost are critical to understanding the issue. On one side of the economic ledger is the cost of the treatment and rehabilitation programs.

These are known costs, and these are the costs that are included in the budget request. We know how much we want to spend on these programs. Yet, the idea that this simply represents new spending, with no trade-off, is entirely false. The trade-off is in ex-convicts who have lower recidivism rates, lower substance abuse rates, and who are more likely to be employable once they have exited the prison system. Without treatment and rehabilitation programs, most inmates spend their prison time on unproductive endeavors.

In many cases, addicts are unable to kick their addiction Part of this is because of the wide availability of drugs within the prison system, but part of this is because without treatment they are likely to relapse quickly after release. Rehabilitation programs help prisoners to re-integrate back into society. The numbers are staggering. Ex-cons as a group are released into the world, a place where they have already demonstrated failure.

Only this time, they have a prison record as well as the same habits and traits that brought them to prison in the first place. The result? Within three years, 2/3 of them will be arrested and half will be back in prison (Gudrais, 2013). This is where rehabilitation and treatment come in. For those inmates who are going to be released back into the community -- there are hundreds of thousands every year in the United States (Gudrais, 2013) -- they will see improved chances of success if they are rehabilitated.

There is a high economic cost to prisoners who find themselves unable to cope in the real world and ultimately back in prison. First, there is the recidivism, which obviously costs in more prison time. Then there is the expense to the taxpayer of supporting people who cannot function in the real world -- welfare, food stamps, trips to the emergency room, and the fact that they are not likely to ever pay a dollar in income tax as long as they live.

Releasing prisoners back into the world with no preparation sets them up for failure, and the taxpayers pay the economic cost of that failure This is not to speak of the social cost. If 50% of ex-cons end up back in prison, that is a lot of new victims of crime, a cost which is paid in lives, in insurance claims, in neighborhood decay and in other social ills.

When you place all of these costs into balance, there is no rational case -- either economic or social -- to deny funding for treatment and rehabilitation. These are not magic bullets, make no mistake. Prisoners can go.