The prison population of the United States has grown exponentially over the last 60 years. In 1950, there were 166,165 people in US state and federal institutions. In 2013, the prison population was 1,574,741. If you include people who are incarcerated in local and county institutions, there are approximately 2.2 million people behind bars in the United States today. Gathered together, the prison population of the US would represent the fourth largest city in the nation, according to the prison policy initiative.
The cost involved in maintaining America’s prisons is a growing burden. We spend far more money on incarceration than we do on education. The Vera Institute of Justice issued a report in 2012 showing that among the 40 states that responded to it survey, state prisons cost taxpayers $31,286 per inmate in the fiscal year 2010. That compares to $10,608 national average among all states spent to educate the public school student in the fiscal year 2012, according to the US Census Bureau.
And the burden of imprisonment falls heavily on African-American men. Among all men, the lifetime likelihood of imprisonment is one in the nine. Among black men, the likelihood of being imprisoned at some time in their life is one in three.
One of the major challenges prison inmates face when they are released does not receive enough attention: The financial challenges.
People who are incarcerated also receive fines and are assigned court costs when they are sentenced. Increasingly prisons also charge inmates while they are incarcerated. Inmates may have had bills, traffic tickets, fines and other outstanding debts prior to their incarceration. Many of the men who are incarcerated also owe large amounts of money for current and back child support payments.
A person who leaves the physical incarceration of the prison frequently faces a kind of financial incarceration that causes him or her to make bad decisions, to fall into desperate patterns of the past, and ultimately to re-offend and end up being sent back into prison.
The Richest Man in New Babylon is a personal finance self-help book written to address – in a small way – the challenges that face people who are incarcerated when they are released.