Space Prison will be far more expensive. You think I’m joking but it’s only a matter of time before we build it. And at the tax payer’s expense.
There are plenty of people who live in abundant luxury. Who are still deeply invested in their ideologies and who are perfectly willing to throw a whole planet under the bus to foster said ideology.
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How much does İmrali cost? There’s only one prisoner there, Abdullah Öcalan who has been there since 1999.
Like Guantánamo Bay, it won’t be worth it, but this is what you get when prisons are an industry.
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Christ, just give them.each two years of their costs (i.e., 2x $13M) in 10 yearly installments (ie $2.6M a year for 10 years), a green card, and ask them to promise to be good.
Dollars to donuts it would work out cheaper AND reduce terrorism.
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You’d need to monitor their spending. They could live off 10% of that and send the other 90% to their ‘friends’ overseas.
(Yeah, I know you weren’t entirely serious.) 
Uh, everyone does realize that Guantanamo is a military base that also has the detention facility, right? It appears that you’re using the budget for the entire base in place of the budget for the detention facility. That’s sort of like looking at Ft. Knox as just a vault and claiming it’s the most expensive vault in the world based on the entire base’s budget. It may be true, but the numbers are off.
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Yeah, that was my biggest disappointment in Obama’s administration. Did some great things, but major fail on that promise.
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I hear that our president owns some “luxury” hotels and that he enjoys renting them to guests of the US government.
Kismet, I call it.
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The people at Guantanamo have never had a trial and it’s unclear if they have ever been terrorists, they should be compensated for being unlawfully imprisoned, regardless of whether or not it reduces terrorism.
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One is reminded of Spandau, or the little island where they held Alfred Dreyfus. Both of which were one prisoner prisons for awhile.
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I know it’s behind a paywall, but at least give @frauenfelder the benefit of the doubt that he read the article. It’s clear from the first 3 paragraphs that the figure only includes the cost of the prison itself completely separate from the military base. If anything, the figure underestimates the real cost of the prison, as it would require greater infrastructure and security if it was truly stand-alone and not part of the military base.
Isn’t Gitmo bad enough?
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About 15 were children as young as 14 years old. Probably a trial run for the ICE camps.
After noticing that their electorate was A-Ok with illegally holding and torturing people/children they decided to try it at home.
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I read the article. True, it’s not the whole base per se. The total sum includes trial costs of $123 million, which is normally not included in prison costs, and double counts personnel cost of around $200 million. The place is outrageously expensive without anyone needing to exaggerate.
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The triall/court costs are part of the prison costs because the prisoners cannot be transported to US soil, and the court has to be taken to the prison. That’s built into the operation of the prison, and cutting that out of the total would be disingenuous. Also, that figure does not include the transportation costs of bringing lawyers and judges and witnesses to the prison, which is substantial. Likewise, I did not think the personnel costs were being double-counted, because the base increased it’s staff when the prison was built. That’s not a coincidence, even if some of the prison personnel overlap with the base personnel.
There is some overaccounting, since the figure includes the cost of building the prison. Assuming it is used indefinitely, that’s a capital cost that will amortize over time (though I hope it stops operation immediately).
If anything, the analysis is not exaggerating, it’s underestimating due to indirect costs associated with the base that are not accounted for in the direct costs of the prison without which it wouldn’t exist.
Only a third of the court costs are travel related. And travel is not unheard of in the USA (my uncle, as a prosecutor, often had to travel. As did defense, experts, etc.). Though these are a lot higher than normal.
Personnel costs are double counted when they take the cost for running the prison system, then add an estimated personnel cost that was based on other estimates, without justifying that the original total cost did not already include personnel costs. Normally a budget includes those already. As well as indirect costs since those would be charged back. The base has its own budget and costs and would be highly unlikely to squeeze their budget to pay for a different unit.
Civilian travel to Gitmo is exceptionally expensive.
On the other point, I don’t think you’re understanding me. My point is that, to run the Gitmo prison on its own in that location because, ya know, CUBA, would require a tremendous amount of additional expense on personnel and security if the base was not there.
While you’re saying, “eh, the base is already there and the additional expense of the prison is just like adding an additional department.”
As a result, I’m saying the real expense of the prison would be 10x what it is if it were stand alone, and you’re saying, since the base is there, they are overestimating costs by 30%.
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Then compare apples to apples and add the of Ft. Leavenworth cost to prisoners at Leavenworth. Because it “would require a tremendous amount of additional expense on personnel and security if the base was not there.” Or the cost of NYC to Rikers.
Guantanamo was chosen because the base was already there. You can’t just say, well because it was sited there, we should price of the preexisting infrastructure into. So yes, it would have cost 10x more to build it stand alone from scratch. That’s an argument for Guantanamo being a bargain.
The article compares costs of different types of prisoners. Ok, comparisons with numbers is good reporting. Assuming you don’t use different accounting for different prisoners. And get the accounting right.
Those aren’t apples to apples; unless you count Kansas or New York as hostile foreign powers. Well, Rikers is close to New Jersey…
I am arguing that the accounting is correct; the prison at Gitmo is unique in the US system, because it isn’t on US soil and it isn’t on an ally’s soil, where either US legal rights or the local legal rights would apply. We might agree that that’s a bug, not a feature, but the US government obviously sees it as a feature. That feature is why the prison is located there, and ignoring that fact doesn’t strengthen your argument. This isn’t a prison that could be housed at Leavenworth or Rammstein or Kadena; in any of those places, most of the prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay would either need to be released immediately or given a timely and fair trial.
Yes, it’s unique. But you still can’t just include the cost of something that already existed for other purposes in your cost estimate. Those were sunk costs regardless of whether you site a prison there or not. And shutting it down wouldn’t save and additional 30% or the 10x you suggest. The arguments you keep making don’t solidify the NYT cost estimate. They open it up to attacks of padding the numbers.
The NYT could have just gone with the straight up verified number of over $300 million. $6 or $7 million a prisoner is a lot of money. Solid argument of it being too much right there. Why go to the effort of inflating it with shaky or unreliable numbers? They made things less solid by comparing regular prisoner costs sans court expenses to ones with. That could have been turned into a second argument by splitting out court court costs per prisoner and comparing to typical costs. The difference would be stark.
I’m totally with you that there are potentially costs not included even if we completely disagree on the amount. But you don’t add shaky numbers to the total, divide by the total number of prisoners, and report it as fact. And you don’t justify it by saying you could have added other shaky numbers, but didn’t.
