Prevention is Cheaper than Incarceration

By Kim Copeland




New Jersey has a choice. It can spend $38,900 per person per year to put women offenders behind bars or it can spend $3,000 per person per year to keep them out of trouble. Last year Ujima Urban Woman Center in the Trenton area, with a budget of $150,000, saved the state almost $2 million by keeping 50 women out of prison.



This is all the more significant because female offenders are America ’s fastest growing prison population. Between 1977 and 2004, the female offender population in U.S. prisons grew by an astonishing 757% percent, according to a 2006 Women’s Prison Association study, “Hard Hit: The Growth in the Imprisonment of Women, 1977-2004” by Frost, Greene and Pranis.



But despite this highly successful and cost-effective program that keeps women off the streets and out of prison, the budgets of Ujima Urban Women Center and the Urban Women Centers in Newark and Camden—funded by the Department of Community Affairs, Division on Women—are scheduled to be axed from the 2011 state budget.



Ujima Urban Women Center is a community outreach program that targets at-risk women, including female offenders and victims of domestic violence. Using a team-based, case-management model, Ujima provides gender-based re-entry strategies as well as mentoring that promotes personal responsibility and gainful employment. The team understands that its members must be sensitive to individual problems, responsive to the particular problems of women, informed about the effects of trauma and knowledgeable about the cultures that have shaped the attitudes of their clients.



Since women are the primary caregivers for minor children, their incarceration has a more deleterious impact on family stability than that of their male counterparts. The incarceration of women has “a destabilizing effect not only on the women’s immediate families, but on the social network of their communities,” according to the Frost study.



The $38,900 year cost of incarcerating a woman does not take into account the social costs of traumatized crime victims, splintered families and troubled children.



The National Institute of Corrections describes female offenders as disproportionately minority with low or limited educational skills. They are often unmarried mothers of minor children and survivors of abuse or trauma. Many have multiple physical and mental health problems and come from fragmented families with high involvement in the criminal justice system.



The female prison population in New Jersey is at an all-time low today because of programs like Ujima’s. However, if the proposed cut goes through, Ujima will have to close its doors on June 30 of this year. As a result, New Jersey taxpayers will foot a much higher bill for incarcerating women who might otherwise be become productive members of our labor force. Voters should remind their representatives at all levels of state government that reducing budgets is not just about cutting deep, it’s about cutting smart. In this case, the bottom line is simple: Prevention is cheaper than incarceration



Kim Copeland is the executive director of Ujima Women Center in Trenton.