No dip in correctional costs despite prison closures and stabilized population

The cost to incarcerate someone in one of New Jersey’s nine state prisons is expected to hit $74,254 a year next year — 12% higher than last year, and nearly four times what the state spends per pupil on schools.

The jump comes despite the closures of four prisons and a 30% drop in the state’s prison population since 2020.

State Department of Corrections Commissioner Victoria Kuhn defended correctional costs in testimony Tuesday before the Senate budget committee, whose members are mulling Gov. Phil Murphy’s $56 billion proposed budget for the coming fiscal year.

Health care costs have soared, the costs for staffing and building construction and repairs are up, and prisons need new, pricey technology like $1.3 million for a mail-scanning system to foil drug smuggling, Kuhn said.

“This budget continues to support meaningful and lasting improvements within the department. It provides the ability to continue to support our staff, enhance successful reintegration of public safety, ensure dignity and safety for our female population, and invest in preserving and improving our facilities,” Kuhn said.

New Jersey now spends about $66,000 per incarcerated person a year, or close to $181 a day. Under Murphy’s budget plan, that would rise to $203 a day. Combined, the corrections department and state parole board would get just over $1.2 billion in the next fiscal year, which starts July 1.

Legislators spent more than two hours quizzing Kuhn and Parole Board Chairman Samuel Plumeri Jr. about trends impacting their budgetary needs.

Several zeroed in on failures uncovered in the past year or so by the state corrections ombudsperson and the news media, including a lack of air conditioning in many prisons, high numbers of people being held in solitary confinement, the cost of calls and emails, and the department’s failure to distribute pay raises to people who work prison jobs.

Such questioning resulted in at least one back-and-forth after Kuhn confirmed that her department won’t spend $2.6 million that lawmakers allocated in the current state budget to raise prison wages for the first time in more than two decades.

“Why not?” Sen. Andrew Zwicker (D-Middlesex) said. “You testified that some people only make a dollar a day, right? $7 a day and change, you said, was the highest. That would be illegal outside of the fact that one is incarcerated. Why not increase it quickly and immediately, given the fact that we appropriated the money? It’s there.”

Kuhn didn’t have a definitive answer, except to confirm that officials did begin distributing pay raises April 1, by an average of 25% per person, for the third of incarcerated people who hold jobs behind bars. Officials also are offering one-time $20 stipends to those who work and $15 incentives for people who “engage in non-assaultive, non-disciplinary, pro-social behavior,” according to a budget document.

“Fiscal indicated to me that it may not spend down the entire 2.6, that’s accurate,” Kuhn said.

She didn’t have details on how much would go unspent, and department spokespeople didn’t know either. Whatever’s not spent by June 30 returns to state coffers.

Zwicker pushed back, too, on the 35 cents the department now charges incarcerated people to send an email.

“Why do you charge anything for sending email?” he asked.

Kuhn blamed the cost on the technology providers, like JPay, which provides tablets that incarcerated people use to communicate with loved ones.

“If the JPay service did not charge it, we would be coming in asking for $1.6 million to subsidize the cost,” she said.

Lawmakers have proposed eliminating the cost of calls and other communications for the state’s incarcerated population, saying maintaining outside connections helps improve mental health for people in prison and reduce recidivism when they are freed.

There was some good news.

Kuhn told lawmakers that conditions at the long-troubled Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women have improved since a brutality and sex abuse scandal led Murphy to order the prison closed and federal authorities to assume oversight.

“We’re going to be going into court to sunset some of the provisions of the consent decree because we’ve been in substantial compliance for three years, so we have the ability to make that application, hopefully by the next time I’m before you (next year),” she said. “Honestly, it’s been a positive experience, the type of sunlight that we needed at the facility, maybe, to jumpstart some change.”