Despite the closures of four prisons and a 30% drop in the state’s prison population since 2020, 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 New Jersey Monitor reports. 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,” she 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.”
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