A new report reveals that state spending on incarceration in the US rose 400 percent between 1980 and 2009.
According to a report by the National Research Council, the rise of incarceration in the US caused a 400 percent increase in state spending between 1980 and 2009. An article in the Washington Post examines the findings of the two-year study, which "concludes that all of its costs — for families, communities, state budgets and society — have simply not been worth the benefit in deterrence and crime reduction." Glenn Loury, the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of Social Science and professor of economics at Brown and an expert on the economics of race and inequality, serves on the National Research Council’s Standing Committee on Law and Justice, which commissioned the report. Loury is a faculty fellow at the Watson Institute.
May 1, 2014