The total number of prisoners under correctional supervision is currently 6.7 million.
Since 1977 the United States has executed 820 prisoners sentenced to death under current capital punishment restrictions.
There are 3,593 people currently awaiting execution, more than half of which have been waiting for over 6 years.
According to the most recent figures, 2.3% of Americans over the age of 12 are victims of violent crimes every year.
The United States Federal and Local governments spend in excess of $150,000,000,000.00 a year on criminal costs and expenses.
The cumulative budget for state correctional costs is greater than $30,800,000,000.00
In cities with a population greater than 10,000 individuals, there is an average of 2.57 paid police officials per 1,000 citizens.
The average entry level salary is $34,556, and for a sergeant, it is $50,541.
Government attorneys invest 11,318,000 hours each year in prosecuting criminals. I can’t find a chart that calculates that cost – but I doubt that prosecuting attorneys work cheap. This does not include defense counsel workloads. So add in court-appointed defenders and how much THEY spend protecting the criminals and include that.
Ok, the prosecuting cost works out to $4,680,000,000 dollars a year.
The Federal Prison occupation level is 139% - 100% means the prison is at maximum allocated population.
There are 2.9 inmates for every paid correctional employee.
100% of Federal Prisons have a taxpayer financed educational program, and 91.2% of all State Prisons have a taxpayer supported educational program for inmates, as well.
http://www.albany.edu/sourcebook/1995/pdf/t111.pdf - Take a look at ‘where’ some of your money is going, bear in mind this is just a single division’s allocation of expenditures.
There is information like this all over the world, I used White House reports, U.S. DoJ publications, and various other Federal Statistical report locations to accumulate this information. Break it all apart though, and it all is here to illustrate just how much money we spend on our criminals.
In 1999 the Department of Education’s total discretionary budget was $33,500,000,000.
TOTAL
There are 3.5 million homeless people in the United States; 1.35 million of those are children.
On a single given night there exists between 500 and 750 thousand people that will not have a place to sleep. There are 8.5 million Americans that live in poverty.
This data was collected from the U.S. DoE and a special congressional report to congress, with various references cited therein.