You asked about the cost of incarcerating an inmate in Connecticut and the cost of having a career criminal on the street.

According to information provided by the Office of Fiscal Analysis, the annual cost to incarcerate an inmate in Connecticut in FY 06 was $44,165. This figure includes fringe benefits, statewide cost allocation program distribution (which the Department of Correction (DOC) must pay other state agencies to provide services), building depreciation, equipment depreciation, bond interest, and miscellaneous revenue. A chart below displays the annual costs for an inmate in specific facilities.

We did not find information on the cost of a career criminal specifically in Connecticut. But we did find a study by Professor Mark Cohen at Vanderbilt University that breaks down the lifetime costs imposed by a career criminal. In a 1998 article, he looked at a target population of chronic juvenile offenders who are assumed to continue a life of crime as an adult. The assumptions used in this study include that a typical adult crime career is six years and the criminal spends nearly eight years in prison. Using 1997 dollars, he concluded that the total external costs of a life of crime range from $1.5 to $1.8 million (Cohen, “The Monetary Value of Saving a High-Risk Youth,” Journal of Quantitative Criminology, Vol. 14, No. 1, 1998).

Using 1997 dollars, Cohen estimated:

1. $165,000 in victim costs per year of a criminal's career (about 35% attributable to tangible costs such as lost wages and medical bills and 65% attributable to the value of lost quality of life to victims);

2. the average career criminal annually adds $40,000 to the cost of the criminal justice system (including investigation, defense, incarceration, parole, and probation); and

3. the prisoner is not a productive member of society while incarcerated and, based on an average of eight years in prison, the total foregone earnings for a career criminal is $60,000 or $52,000 in present value terms.

Cohen concluded that juvenile delinquency between age 14 and 17 imposes $83,000 to $335,000 while an adult career criminal adds $1.4 million. He concluded that the total external costs of a life of crime range from $1.5 to $1.8 million. Of this amount, about 25% is tangible victim costs, 50% lost quality of life, 20% criminal justice costs, and 5% offender productivity losses (Cohen, “The Monetary Value of Saving a High-Risk Youth,” Journal of Quantitative Criminology, Vol. 14, No. 1, 1998).

The Office of Fiscal Analysis provided us with the annual cost to incarcerate an inmate in specific facilities in Connecticut in FY 06. This figure includes fringe benefits, statewide cost allocation program distribution (which the Department of Correction (DOC) must pay other state agencies to provide services), building depreciation, equipment depreciation, bond interest, and miscellaneous revenue. The chart below displays this information.

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