Sentencing Project

A recent report found that jailing a person in New York City for one year costs more than four years of tuition at an Ivy League university. The Independent Budget Office found that in 2012 it cost the city $167,731 to hold each of its daily average of 12,287 prisoners, or about $460 per person per day. Undergraduate tuition at Harvard University is $38,891 annually, or $155,564 for a four-year degree. Of those people incarcerated, more than 2,000 were being held for drug offenses, surpassing the number for murders or robberies. The majority of the prisoners are African-American (57 percent), followed by Hispanics (33 percent), whites (7 percent) and Asians (1 percent), a New York City Department of Corrections report said. The majority come from less affluent areas of the city. The United States leads the world in the number of people behind bars, according to the International Center for Prison Studies in London.  The so-called war on drugs and mandatory minimum sentencing and related laws enacted in the 1980s and 1990s have contributed to a rising number of inmates, especially those charged with drug-related offenses.