Financial Cost
Data collected for financial costs and expenditure data collected from a variety of sources. Topics are focused around inmate costs of living, legal representations fees, methods of execution expenditures, as well as comparing other per capita costs. Ultimately our goal with this portion of our investigation towards better understanding is to highlight how inefficient running capital punishment in our justice system monetarily speaking.
This bar plot displays the distribution of all the sub costs that go into paying for an inmate. The total upon adding up all the categories comes out to ~ $80,000 per inmate. That is just a baseline too, independent of the additional costs and fees being tacked on depending on the individuals sentence (execution surprisingly being more expensive than the life sentence) - makes thinking about how much goes into capital punishment more hard to believe considering its rather debatable efficacy in society.
More Context...
Now this graph provides further context to the previous bar plot for cost; as the years have past, more and more inmates are populating prisons across the nation, with us barely beginning to cut back on the near 2,500,000 inmates as of the mid 2000s. Multiply the number of inmates currently in prison by the average per capita cost...thats a lot of money being invested on just the prison population alone - this doesn't even account for the additional fees associated with whatever sentence the inmate gets, whether it is execution or a life sentence. Truly astonishing how many funds get burned.
Similar but different; here we look at the imprisonment rate based on 100,000 of the national population. Again shows how the increased rate in which prisons are being filled supplements a dimension of analysis when it comes to seeing the total monetary cost of our justice system.
For perspective...
Now with this bar plot, we'll be taking what we understand of the prison per capita expenditure costs and comparing them to what would commonly be considered larger per capita investments in society. Included are entities like different college paths (private, public in-state, and public out-of-state), along with military per capita (2019) and average annual car expenditure totals (2019). Here we can see the baseline costs for inmates along supersedes all of these other per capita investments.