Fox News
Sept. 30, 2013
New York is indeed an expensive place, but experts say that alone doesn’t explain a recent report that found the city’s annual cost per inmate was $167,731 last year — nearly as much as it costs to pay for four years of tuition at an Ivy League university.
They say a big part of it is due to New York’s most notorious lockup, Rikers Island, and the costs that go along with staffing, maintaining and securing a facility that is literally an island unto itself.
“Other cities don’t have Rikers Island,” said Martin F. Horn, who in 2009 resigned as the city’s correction commissioner, noting that hundreds of millions of dollars are spent a year to run the 400-acre island in the East River next to the runways of LaGuardia Airport that has 10 jail facilities, thousands of staff and its own power plant and bakery.
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