Keeping Current

I used to do this fairly often when I worked for Probation and Parole, and it was a lot harder to do during the pre-internet days.  But, it's revealing to look at these things sometimes.

If you go to the Division of Administration for the Gret Stet of LA, we find the Corrections services budget for the penitentiary system is $558838822.  Then we go to the LADOC Briefing Book and find that we house 33186 offenders in our system.  If we divide those two numbers, we get something like $16,839.59 which represents the cost to house one adult offender for a year.  Divide that by 365 and we get $46.14, as the cost to house one adult offender for one day.

Louisiana houses a larger percentage of hit's state offenders in local jails rather than sending them to the state penitentiary.  This saves the state a lot of money, but the state does reimburse the local sheriffs for housing those offenders, but at the rate of roughly $25 dollars a day.

Jails are cost centers, expensive cost centers, and they are a necessary part of public safety.  If you are a public safety administrator, these figures are good to have at your fingertips, so I'm going to leave them here so I can find them later.