Analyzing the Financial and Social Impact of Prisons

All over the world jails old and new have cost the government and taxpayers billions of dollars in supplies for inmates, hospital bills, building funds and more. Prisons are used to help society function and the use of making an example of those who commit crimes to deter others from doing the same. The use of punishment can be put into five different categories, retribution, incapacitation, deterrence, rehabilitation and utilitarianism.Each prison has had its up’s and down’s, and its fair share of mistreatment and rebellion. Each jail has its fair share of famous and outrageous criminals but the two jails being analyzed have held the most notorious gangster in America in the 1920’s until his untimely death in 1947 and the 89 - 93 backpacker

This burden on the government complies with taxpayers and this means that either taxes go up as jails acquire more or there is less money to help society push forward. The cost for keeping Goulburn supermax open is at an all-time high of $3.8 billion each year, this doesn’t include any other prisons in Australia. “More than 36,000 people are now in prisons around the nation - an annual cost of $110,000 per prisoner - compared to a national total in 1975 of just 8900 prisoners.” (The Australian, 2016) this can be enhanced by that fact that to keep Ivan Milat locked up in Goulburn’s supermax it cost $824 each day. (The Daily Telegraph, 2009) According to the Australian government since 2002 the cost of criminal justice has increased by 33 percent overall and by an average of seven percent each year since. This same ideology goes for the cost of running Alcatraz as it was costing $3-5 million which can be estimated to $24.6 - $41 million today, this meant it was cheaper to build and open a new prison.

The purpose of utilitarianism is to have “the general object of all laws have, or ought to have, in common, is to augment the total happiness of the community; and therefore, in the first place to exclude, as far as may be, everything that tends to subtract from that happiness: in other words exclude mischief.”

The first man to be put in Goulburn’s supermax was Ivan Milat who murdered 7 people between 1989 till 1993, he is known as the backpacker murderer and has been given seven life sentences. In the 1930’s to the 1960’s Alcatraz supermax prison was used as a prison for the worst of the worst on an island off of the san Francisco bay area, approximately 1.25 miles from the shore surrounded in freezing cold water. Al Capone also known as ‘scarface’ was a notorious gangster of the 1920’s, he was imprisoned at Alcatraz from 1936 till 1939, this short sentence was because of his poor health. Both these Prisons were formed with the utilitarian ideology in mind to teach society what happens when you disobey the law, and the prison system you’d end up at