A few years ago I read that Pennsylvania (where I lived for my first 35 years) spent ~ $60K per year for each person in prison. For comparison, I just looked up the current stats and read that my current home state of NC spends ~ $63K per inmate.
Then yesterday, I read that the city of Raleigh is launching a new program to help the homeless get jobs, homes and “reintegration” assistance to combat the homeless problem in our area. The estimated cost is $20-30K per person. A spokesman was quoted as saying this cost is much lower than the costs of treating homeless people through the existing system of police, shelters, ER visits, jail etc. which they estimated to be 2-3x higher per person. (This program actually sounds pretty good to me vs. the current response of do nothing and imprisonment.)
But here’s my question regarding both situations:
What if we just gave them the money?
When I heard about inmate costs in PA, my initial thought was we could pay for each inmate to go to college, including room and board while providing a decent stipend of spending money for less than the cost of sending them to prison. Why not at least try this?
As for the homeless people – rather than spend money on social service programs, middlemen, budget negotiations and other bureaucratic services, what if we gave the money directly to the homeless people to do with as they saw fit?
Given the high rate a recidivism in American prisons, I can’t imagine we would have worse results.
Given the abysmal track record we have combatting mental illness, drug addiction and homelessness, why not try something radically different?
What’s the worst that could happen? Failure?
We already know what that’s like.