Yeah you can find reports of NYC's costs of locking up a person for 1 year, it's roughly $170k. Absolutely insane.

One can easily imagine that, for $170k, you can build a strict prison. You put a person out of his own community of friends and family. You brandish him as a criminal, preventing him to easily return to his friends and family a year later. You put him in a community of only criminals, who become his new network, people to associate and compare to, and get help and jobs from. You then freeze his career/education for a year while he's in prison. And then create a record, so that if he looks for a job or a house, he'll likely be rejected because of that record.

Of course that person is 1 million times more likely to continue and delve deeper into a life of crime after that 1 year.

Now imagine what you can do with $170k.

You can get him a tiny studio in NYC for $30k. You can go to any company and say here's $30k, please keep $10k as a bonus, and pay out the other $20k to this guy (the 'criminal') for the 20h job you're creating for him. Costs the company 0, they make $10k and get a free employee. Then you go to a college in NYC and say, enrol this guy for a 20h a week programme, here's $40k. You then go to a social worker and pay him $10k and say, meet with him for a year, twice a week for an hour, and spend another hour preparing and planning things for him.

The kid makes $20k a year to spend on food, insurance etc, clothes, transport etc. He gets free housing and free education and a guaranteed job, and free 1-on-1 coaching.

The cost? $50k cheaper than you'd pay to send him to prison to become a professional criminal.

What are the odds he goes back to jail? Not zero, but a helluvalot smaller.

It's not as simple as this, but it's easy to imagine a better allocation of all this prison money. It's ridiculous.