Inmates America: What It Costs to Run America's Prisons

America's prison population continues to explode, and so does the cost of keeping so many Americans locked up.

According to Pew Center on the States, America now has one adult inmate for every 99.1 American adults. Of a total of 230 million American adults, our prison population stands at 2,319,258. Only America holds this distasteful record. We incarcerate more of our citizens than totalitarian Russia (864,590 prisoners), more than even communist China, with its 1.3 billion people (1.5 million inmates).

So, while we rightly spew human rights lectures at China, the Chinese government only needs to throw it back at us that we have 1 percent of our adult population behind bars.

People, that's a whole lot of our precious human resources wasting away in jails, prisons, and half-way houses all across this land of the free. And it costs billions of dollars to keep those Americans locked up. The 50 states of the USA spend a total of $49 billion a year on incarceration. Twenty years ago, the cost was less than $11 billion.

In a recent town hall meeting, Governor Steve Beshear said it costs the state of Kentucky $20,000 a year to incarcerate just one person. In 2007, Kentucky led the nation in the increase of inmate population. Governor Beshear points out that though Kentucky's crime rate has increased by only 3 percent in the past 30 years, the state's inmate population has soared a whopping 600%.

Actually, the actual number is higher than the Governor's estimate of $20,000 per inmate. Kentucky, which had 3,000 inmates in 1973, now has 22,000 inmates as of 2008, and the state has been spending $500 million each year to house those inmates. If you do the math, it's costing Kentucky taxpayers about $22,727 to incarcerate one inmate for one year.