Calculating the cost of punishment

Judges in St Louis are to be given new information when sentencing convicted criminals: how much a given punishment will cost the state. So for a convicted thief, a judge will now learn how much imprisoning that thief would cost, compared to the cost of punishing them in the community.

Pressure on criminal justice budgets has fuelled an explosion of innovative penal reforms across the US, from New York's experiments with drug courts to Michigan's decision to actually close down prisons. However, Missouri is the first state to systematically provide information about the costs of punishment to judges.

Its a bold move. Many would argue that justice should remain independent of cost considerations and that a criminal's fate should not be determined by a bureaucrat's interpretation of what is 'affordable'. A more nuanced concern might also be over the methodology used to calculate such costs. There is lots of data telling us what the average cost of imprisonment is but this tends to be pretty generic and smoothes over some important variables. For example, the cost of punishing an offender depends, not just on the cost of administering a particular punishment, but on that offender's likelihood of re-offending and therefore of being re-convicted. If the offender breaches a community sentence and is re-sentenced to prison, the state has paid twice over. Perhaps you could get around this by also publishing the likely re-offending rate of a particular offender, but this would open up a whole other range of methodological uncertainties.

On the other hand, supporters of such a move would argue, as they have in Missouri, that nobody is forcing the judge to do anything he or she doesn't want to: this is just more information being made available to them when making their decision. Economic considerations play roles in all sorts of important public policy decisions, so why not sentencing? Justice has a price, just like anything else.

These debates are obviously live within the UK right now, with the forthcoming spending review around the corner and the justice department being one of the unprotected departments. Ultimately though, this is unlikely to be a panacea to the problem of prison over-crowding, at least in the UK. That's because, contrary to widespread perception, the huge rise in the prison population has not been caused by an over-incarceration of non-violent offenders, such as shop-lifters for whom prison might not be the obvious answer, but by a general harshening of sentencing practice for more serious crimes, such as sexual offences and violence against the person. And even in Missouri, they do not envisage the cost of punishment being a consideration in the most violent cases.