Fact 1: Expenditures on police, corrections, and the judiciary have increased over time.
The United States spends large and growing sums on criminal justice. In 1982, real per capita spending on law enforcement was $205; when added to spending of $98 and $84 on corrections and the judicial system, respectively, the United States spent roughly $388 per capita on criminal justice in that year. Since then, all three of those expenditures have grown dramatically, with corrections expenditures growing especially quickly through the end of the 20th century, as shown in figure 1. Corrections spending has grown only 6 percent since 2000, when the incarceration rate leveled off and eventually began to decline, but total criminal justice spending rose 16 percent to its 2015 level of $937 per capita.
Corrections spending—which includes not only incarceration but also parole, probation, and rehabilitation—cost the country fully $92 billion in 2015. Incarceration is particularly expensive, constituting 85.7 percent of corrections spending at the state level (BJS 1982–2015).
These growing expenditures have put pressure on state and local budgets. Unsurprisingly, they coincide with an increasing tendency to use monetary sanctions to fund the criminal justice system (Bannon, Nagrecha, and Diller 2010).