Thread: Non-U.S. citizens run up a big bill at Utah's prisons

Non-U.S. citizens run up a big bill at Utah's prisons
$6.7 million this year: State taxpayers foot most of the cost as the federal aid dwindles
By Lisa Rosetta
The Salt Lake Tribune



Utah taxpayers will spend about $6.7 million this year to lock up criminals - many of whom have first-degree felony and capital convictions - who are not U.S. citizens, a Utah Department of Corrections official told state lawmakers Wednesday.
Federal funding to cover the cost of imprisoning the immigrants is dwindling, and may dry up altogether, said Deputy Director Christine Mitchell.
In 1996, Utah received $442,318 from the federal State Criminal Alien Assistance Program. Established in 1994, the program defrays state and local costs to incarcerate immigrants doing time for a felony conviction or at least two misdemeanors.
A year later, the state's share from the feds surged to $1.8 million and eventually peaked at $2.3 million in 1999. It has since shriveled up.
The federal funding has been declining in both total distributions and even more as a share of the state's expenses, according to the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a private nonprofit organization that tracks immigration trends.
In 1999, federal money covered 39 percent of the state's costs to house non-citizen inmates. This year, Utah received $368,307, which covers just 5 percent of the $7.1 million the state will spend housing non-citizens, Mitchell said.
When Corrections began receiving the federal awards in 1996, it believed the money would flow every year, she said. Now Corrections is operating on the assumption it will soon vanish.
"Right now we don't budget for those funds," she said.
There are 322 offenders in Utah's prisons who are not U.S. citizens, and of those, 260 have been identified by Immigration and Customs Enforcement as undocumented immigrants, Mitchell said. The offenders represent 32 countries, the top five being Mexico, Vietnam, Tonga, El Salvador and Guatemala.
About half of the 322 offenders have been convicted of serious crimes, such as murder, rape, sexual assault and robbery. Nearly a third are behind bars for child sex offenses, mirroring the percentage of the general prison population incarcerated for the same crimes.
Mitchell said most undocumented immigrants who commit less serious crimes are deported rather than imprisoned.
While the number of undocumented immigrants has steadily increased, it continues to make up about only 5 percent of the total prison population.
lrosetta@sltrib.com

http://www.sltrib.com/utah/ci_3965723

6.7 million to pay for criminals that should not even be in the country in the first place

The other side needs to stop spouting how the contributions of illegals outweight the costs. It is simply impossible.

After seeing that, I had to check out my very own state. Got Utah beat by a mile, I am sorry to say.



Costs of Illegal Immigration to Floridians: Executive Summary (Revised 10/05)


File Attached - click here for more info




Analysis of the latest Census data indicates Florida’s illegal immigrant population is costing the state’s taxpayers nearly two billion dollars per year for education, medical care and incarceration. Even if the estimated taxes collected from illegal immigrant workers are subtracted, net outlays still amount to nearly one billion dollars per year. The annual fiscal burden amounts to about $315 per Florida household headed by a native-born resident.

This analysis looks specifically at the costs to the state for education, health care and incarceration resulting from illegal immigration. These three are the largest cost areas, and they are the same three areas analyzed in a 1994 study conducted by the Urban Institute, which provides a useful baseline for comparison a decade later. Other studies have been conducted in the interim, showing trends that support the conclusions of this report.

There are other significant costs associated with illegal immigration, and federal and state officials should take these into account as well. Even without accounting for all of the numerous areas in which costs associated with illegal immigration are being incurred by Florida taxpayers, the program areas analyzed in this study indicate that the burden is substantial and that the costs are rapidly increasing.

The nearly two billion dollars in costs incurred by Florida taxpayers annually result from outlays in the following areas:

Education. Based on estimates of the illegal immigrant population in Florida and documented costs of K-12 schooling, Floridians spend more than $1.5 billion annually on education for illegal immigrant children and for their U.S.-born siblings. About 8.7 percent of the K-12 public school students in Florida are children of illegal aliens.


Health Care. Taxpayer-funded, unreimbursed medical outlays for health care provided to the state’s illegal alien population amount to about $165 million a year.


Incarceration. The uncompensated cost of incarcerating illegal aliens in Florida’s state and county prisons amounts to about $155 million a year (not including local jail detention costs or related law enforcement and judicial expenditures or the monetary costs of the crimes that led to their incarceration).

State and local taxes paid by the unauthorized immigrant population go toward offsetting these costs, but they do not come near to matching the expenses. The total of such payments can generously be estimated at about $910 million per year.

The fiscal costs of illegal immigration do not end with these three major cost areas. The total costs of illegal immigration to the state’s taxpayers would be considerably higher if other cost areas such as special English instruction, welfare programs used by the U.S.-born children of illegal aliens, or welfare benefits for American workers displaced by illegal alien workers were also calculated.


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I've been trying to find NC's cost on illegals in prison but haven't found what I am looking for yet.