Modeling the Human Cost of Jail Incarceration in New Orleans

• In Event: Bail and Criminal Justice Fines and Fees in New Orleans: The Human and Financial Impacts

Abstract

Most cost-benefit analyses of incarceration focus on crime victims and taxpayers, ignoring the perspective of incarcerated people. Yet jail incarceration clearly causes harm, and an analysis that ignores this perspective does not capture the full impact of incarceration. This paper will examine the human cost of jail incarceration in New Orleans, where the inability to afford bail or pay criminal justice fines and fees lands individuals in jail or extends jail stays. Using the extant cost of crime literature and New Orleans economic data, this paper will provide a first of its kind model of the costs of jail incarceration in New Orleans to the incarcerated individual, including lost wages and lost employment, fees paid during incarceration, the cost of child care, and the harm–translated into financial cost–of the risk of sexual and physical assault and suicide. Because most jail inmates are poor, the immediate financial losses of jail incarceration are especially harmful. Finally, the paper will examine policy alternatives to the user-pay system that would both offer the city potential cost savings and mitigate the harms attendant to jail incarceration.

Author

• Chris Mai, Vera Institute of Justice