Texas Prison Budget

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Each country remains entitled to have their choice of government decide how public funding is spent and how much money is allocated to the criminal justice system. Accordingly, as a result of the government’s decisions in the United States, each of its states is able to determine how they will distribute their public funding. Unfortunately, more money is required within the criminal justice system than what is collectively brought in. Funding starts from the first interaction with police officers, booking at the jail facility, housing at the jail facility, pre-arraignment with a judge and defense attorney, bails bondman and depending on conviction or lack thereof probation officer or housing in a prison facility. When dealing with housing at …show more content…
The increase of jail space is undoubtedly will be forced to fill these beds space to justify the need to build these facilities in the eyes of the tax payers. As mentioned in The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society, “Even excluding value judgments about rehabilitative methods, the fact that an adult probationer costs 38 cents a day and an adult offender in prison costs $5.24 a day suggests the need for reexamining current budget allocations in correctional practice.” There is an average of 141,000 prisoners that are incarcerated in Texas jails. Seeing the $5.24 a day to house a prisoner some see that is the cost of a meal at a local fast food restaurant. Calculating and multiplying 141,000 times the cost to house these prisoners per day, $5.24, it comes to $738,840 just for Texas prisons per day. When a repeat offender experiences these accommodations and weigh in the difference of being out in the streets with no food or bed they tend to rather be incarcerated than being exposed to the negative aspects of poverty. As the revolving door of repeat offenders turns in our criminal justice system it exposes the offender’s family members to the negative effects of

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