By JACOB KANG-BROWN and PETER WAGNER
February 11, 2026
Following the Money of Mass Incarceration 2026 | Prison Policy Initiative
“The broad system of mass incarceration costs the government and families of system-involved people at least $445 billion every year.”
Reflects astronomical economic, social, and human costs of mass incarceration.
EXCERPTS: The costs of funding the police — especially the bloated budgets of militarized federal agencies in the Department of Homeland Security — have become a recurring theme in discussions about criminal legal system policy.
The expenses covered in this report do not include a full accounting of the current, ongoing economic harms of mass incarceration. For example, we do not include recent estimates of income lost when people get sent to jail or prison ($111 billion per year) or income lost by children of incarcerated parents during their working years ($215 billion per year). For that reason, our estimate — as massive as it is — should be viewed as a limited one.
At the same time, crime has declined and fewer people are incarcerated, yet spending on the criminal legal system has still increased faster than inflation. All parts of the system, from local jails to fines and fees and prison industries, deserve a clear accounting and a hard look.
Our goal with this report is to give the “big picture” view of the economic incentives that help shape the criminal legal system, by identifying some of the key stakeholders and quantifying their “stake” in the status quo. Our data visualization shows how wide and how deep mass incarceration and criminalization have spread into the U.S. economy. We find:
- POLICING is a massive public expense and its spending has grown faster than other parts of the system in recent years. Federal expenditures related to policing and the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda now make up 25% of all government spending on the criminal legal system. . . .
- PUBLIC SYSTEM COSTS: The criminal legal system is overwhelmingly a public system, with private prison companies acting only as extensions of the public system. The government payroll for corrections employees is over 100 times higher than the private prison industry’s profits.
- COSTS TO PRISONERS AND FAMILIES: Individuals who come into contact with the system — and their loved ones — pay over $27.7 billion a year in fines and fees, bail premiums, commissary payments, and telecommunications costs. This is over five times the amount that goes to private prisons and detention centers. Despite the fact that the Constitution requires counsel to be appointed for defendants unable to afford legal representation, the government spends only $7.9 billion on this right.
- Feeding and providing health care for nearly 2 million people, even as inadequately as they do behind bars, is expensive at $18 billion per year.
WHAT’S CHANGED SINCE 2017
Public funding for the criminal legal system has increased in recent years, even as the number of people involved in the system has declined, reflecting changes in priorities as well as economic factors like inflation.
The largest total increase has been funding for policing, but the most rapid funding increase came in 2025 for ICE, Border Patrol and other agencies involved in the criminalization of immigration and immigration detention.
The 31% inflation from 2017 to 2025 can disguise some of the changes in spending, so this visual adjusts the 2017 figures to their value in 2025. . .
Spending on policing rose by $58.3 billion (a 40% increase) between 2017 and 2025. Expanded federal budgets account for about one-third of that increase ($19.3 billion), while state and local policing budgets grew by $38.5 billion. In contrast to the steep funding increase for police agencies, spending on public libraries grew only 22% in this same time period, from $12.7 to $15.4 billion, not even keeping pace with inflation (which was 31.5% between 2017 and 2025).
Corrections spending, a category that includes local jail, prison, probation, and parole systems, shot up $24.8 billion (a 27% increase) between 2017 and 2025, even as correctional populations shrank by over 1 million people (15%). Even as prison and jail populations have dropped, correctional payrolls continue to swell; agencies rely on overtime to meet staffing requirements and offer increasingly generous pay in vain attempts to relieve chronic understaffing.
Memorials for Renee Good, Alex Pretti in Minneapolis; ICE, CBP costs up to $54.3 Billion in 2025.
Judicial and legal expenses connected to criminal law enforcement, such as spending on prosecution and defense, grew by $10.7 billion (a 32% increase). While still under-funded compared to prosecution, increased funding for indigent defense has narrowed the gap in some states.
Finally, federal immigration- and border-related policing and immigration detention totaled $54.3 billion in 2025, up from $20 billion in 2017, making this the fastest-growing public expense in the sector. The 2025 budget, 2.7 times larger than in 2017, now makes up 13% of all government spending on the criminal legal system.
CONCLUSIONS
Heroes of 1971 Attica Prison Rebellion present demands for humane treatment to NY Prisons Comm. Russell Oswald. Days later, state troops slaughtered dozens of them in D Yard. Mass incarceration has risen astronomically in the decades since, touted by Democratic and Republican administrations alike.
. . . By following the money, one can see that private prison corporations aren’t the only ones who benefit from mass incarceration. By far, the public agencies and public employees are the key beneficiaries. Some of the lesser-known major players in the system of mass incarceration and criminalization include:
- Bail bond companies that collect $1.65 billion in nonrefundable fees from defendants and their families. The industry also actively works to block or rollback reforms that threaten its profits, even though reforms have been shown to reduce wealth-based pretrial detention while maintaining public safety.
- Commissary vendors and specialized telecommunications companies that sell goods, tablets, and phone calls to incarcerated people — who rely largely on money sent by loved ones — is an even larger industry that brings in $5.6 billion a year.
- Correctional health care providers that provide, at great cost, inadequate staffing, medicine, and care to people behind bars.
A graphic like this shows the relative economic cost of different parts of mass incarceration, but it can also obscure the fact that we don’t have a single monolithic “system.” Instead, we have 50 state systems, thousands of local government systems, and a federal system.
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Remembering Imam Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin: Activist F/K/A as H. Rap Brown Dead at 82 
By 1967, the activist became chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee at just 23 and immediately pushed the group to remove the word “nonviolent” from its name. His speeches captured the rage of Black communities across America. He reminded audiences that Black people had waited a century after emancipation for promises that never came. 
“To God we belong and to Him we return,” CAIR National Executive Director Nihad Awad said in a statement. “Imam Jamil Al-Amin was a hero of the civil rights movement and a victim of injustice who passed away in a prison, jailed for a crime he did not commit.” 
DETROIT– “Every 10 years, we do studies but don’t do nothing about them. Millions of dollars spent and where does it go?” 
Now. a Coalition of the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office, the Detroit Police Department, the Third Judicial Circuit Court of Michigan, the Michigan State Appellate Defender Office (SADO) and the Cooley Innocence Project, coordinated by the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice in Pennsylvania, has produced yet another study.
VOD has read the full report but is not covering it in detail, other than quotes showing that its results are NOT INTENDED FOR PREVIOUS CONVICTIONS, and that CRIMINAL COPS AND OTHER ACTORS WILL NOT BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE. 
Rally for Ricky Rimmer-Bey at Detroit’s Criminal InJustice Center September 10, 2024.
“David McKinney is arrested on November 20, 2004,” Yost recounts. “Per the Investigator’s Report, Police Report and Walker Hearing testimony of Detective Anthony Delgreco, McKinney was arrested on an outstanding narcotic charge.
“The statement of 14-year-old Clifford (last name withheld from publication) who received a plea deal for his testimony, gave multiple statements to police and failed a polygraph. When [he] indicates he has information on the Inkster Case his statement to DPD mentions “Nephew” – later identified as Anthony Fields who is tied to selling a gun stolen from the gun shop.
VOD reviewed McKinney’s homicide file, trial transcripts including the Walker Hearing, and other documentation, but noted no evidence that other possible suspects were investigated, either by the Inkster Police Department, the Wayne County Prosecutor, or the ATF.
Willie Wimberly, 16-yr. old victim of 1999 Inkster drive-by shooting that killed one, injured two, testified Oct. 8, 2024 at evidentiary hearing that Mike D was not the shooter, as he told OIC Darian K. Williams and Sgt. Gregory Hill at the time.
Degraffenried wrote further, “[The prosecution] hid this information from the defense and allowed perjured testimony to be introduced to the jury through the state’s main eyewitness Broderick Ward, an eyewitness that the first responding police officer, Jamie Devoll. testified as to not being on the scene at the time of the shooting.”
A pre-trial date is set for Oct. 9, and new trial for Nov. 11 before Judge Green, Rm. 506, Wayne Co. Criminal Justice Center, 5301 Russell, Detroit, MI. 48211.*
DETROIT — It is hard to believe so many Detroiters now disregard the city’s history as a vanguard of the Black liberation movement in the 1960’s and 70’s.
But in recent years, Detroiters have elected Black judges like Christopher Blount, whose father Michael Blount was one of the few Black cops on S.T.R.E.S.S., and other judges who also blatantly ignore the rulings of higher courts on false convictions, as they add to the devastation wrought in the Black community by mass incarceration. 
1971 ROCHESTER STREET MASSACRE of Wayne Co. Sheriffs involving among others: Sgt. JAMES HARRIS of S.T.R.E.S.S.
Ruling by USDC Judge Stephen A. Murphy, Magistrate Elizabeth Stafford is first victory in lawsuit vs. conditions at WHC, filed in 2019
MDOC Director Heidi Washington multiple other officials, represented by MI Atty. General Dana Nessel, promptly appeal to 6th Circuit Court
DETROIT–Six years after they filed a class-action suit regarding horrific conditions including rampant black mold and filthy ventilation systems throughout Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility, women there won an outstanding ruling from U.S. District Court Judge Stephen J. Murphy June 24, which adopted the March 12 Report of Magistrate Judge Elizabeth Stafford.
On qualified immunity, he said, “All defendants’ Eighth Amendment deliberate indifference claims must satisfy a two-part test with an objective and subjective component. The objective prong asks whether the inmate was incarcerated under conditions posing a substantial risk of serious harm. The subjective prong then asks whether officials knew of and disregarded that excessive risk to the inmate’s health or safety.” Here, Plaintiffs satisfy both prongs.”
Meanwhile, Jay Love, host of the podcast, “Turning a Moment into a Movement,” and Trishe Duckworth, head of Survivors Speak, have mounted an emergency campaign for the release and hospitalization of plaintiff Krystal Clark, who doctors say could die if she is not released from prison forthwith. They are asking people to call Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and email MDOC Director Heidi Washington.
