Recently, I heard a fascinating interview with Larry Krasner, the DA for Philadelphia. It really challenged some of my thoughts on incarceration and inspired me to do a little research, locally. Here are some interesting statistics that I found for Oregon:
- 2017-2019 Dept of Corrections Budget: $1.76B ($880m annually) Source
- Average Daily Prison Population: 14,835 Source
- Average cost per inmate: $59,319 ($880m / 14,835)
- White 74.5% (vs 76.4% of normal state population)
- Hispanic 12.1% (vs 12.8% of normal state population)
- Black 9% (vs 2.1% of normal state population)
- 62.7% are over the age of 30
- Male 81%
- Female 19%
- Sherman County, 2.83 / 1000
- Marion County, 2.14 / 1000
- Jefferson County, 1.96 / 1000
- Linn County, 1.89 / 1000
- Clatsop County, 1.86 / 1000
- Drugs 20%
- Assault 13.4%
- Other 12.6%
- Theft 9.3%
- Burglary 8.9%
- Average Teacher Salary: $59,204 Source
- Total Number of Teachers: 22,357 Source
- Median Class Size: 25 Source
- It's fascinating that every incarcerated inmate almost exactly equals a full time teacher. (These costs don't even include local and municipal jail costs.)
- African American Oregonians are clearly incarcerated at a much higher rate than either caucasian or hispanic Oregonians.
- It's ALARMING that 12.6% of the prison population is incarcerated for offenses labeled as "other". Take a look at the source for the incarceration cause breakdown and you can see how granular it gets which makes the "other" classification that much more troublesome. (Forgery weighs in at a whopping 0.4%)
- The likelihood of incarceration has nothing to do with the population density that you live in. Only one of the top 5 counties in the per capita list would be considered urban.