The fantasy that cutting prison populations saves a lot of money

Joshua Crawford in Governing

Originally published October 31, 2025

 State leaders hoping to trim budgets by reducing prison populations are in for some disappointment. Proponents of decarceration often tout potential savings, but despite a 24 percent drop in state prison populations since 2010, corrections spending has continued to rise.

Over the past decade, states have enacted hundreds of criminal justice reforms — from reclassifying drug possessions to reducing mandatory minimum sentences — often with the promise of both greater fairness and lower costs. Yet while these policies have succeeded in driving down incarceration rates, they have failed to deliver the taxpayer savings that many conservative lawmakers expected when they pushed for criminal justice reform.

This is because incarcerating criminals is expensive. Using the aggregate division method — taking the total cost to incarcerate for a year and dividing it by the average number of inmates a state houses in a year — state per-prisoner expenditures range from $22,981 per prisoner per year in Arkansas to $307,468 in Massachusetts. So reducing the prison population by 100 people, decarceration advocates argue, should yield an annual savings of over $2.2 million in Arkansas and over $30 million in Massachusetts.

But in the years since the wave of reforms, neither overall state budgets nor department of corrections budgets have declined. In fact, state budgets increased in every state and state corrections budgets increased in all but two states. So why didn’t the promised fiscal benefits to taxpayers come to fruition?

First, it’s important to understand that state corrections budgets have always made up a relatively small percentage of overall state expenditures — never more than 5 percent. This is far below the cost of education (25-35 percent), public welfare (20-25 percent), highways (5-10 percent), and hospitals and health care (5-10 percent). It was always going to be hard to cut overall state spending by reducing one of the smaller budget items.

Read the full article here.

Joshua Crawford is the Director of Criminal Justice Initiatives at the Georgia Center for Opportunity and the author of “Kids and Community Violence: Costs, Consequences, and Solutions” in the edited volume Doing Right by Kids.