Illinois spends one-hundred-eleven thousand dollars to house a juvenile offender in a state-run center for a year. That’s what a study being released Tuesday reports.
What Illinois – and 45 other states -- spend to feed, house, counsel and otherwise care for young offenders in a state facility is just too much.
According to a Justice Policy Institute study released Tuesday, the average national cost is just shy of one-hundred-fifty thousand dollars per offender each year.
And jailing young people rather than helping them in their communities has costs far beyond their sentences.
The study says taxpayers shell out between eight and twenty-one billion dollars each year in long-term costs for juvenile offenders.
That includes lost future earnings and tax revenue, costs to provide health care, the costs of violence, and the cost of future offenses.
