Costly incarcerations: Rikers' riches.

• Author: Shackford, Scott
• Position: Citings - Cost to operate prison in Rikers Island, New York - Brief article

NEW YORK'S expensive real estate market apparently does not exclude Rikers Island. It is so expensive to house inmates at the prison there that it would probably be cheaper just to send them to college.

In September, the Associated Press (AP) reported that New York City paid $167,731 per prisoner in housing costs last year. As the AP noted, that's the cost of about four years at an Ivy League school. It is also more than three times what cities like Los Angeles and Chicago pay to warehouse prisoners.

Part of the problem is the prison's location on a 400-acre island. The city pays more than $30 million a year just to transport prisoners to courts and bring visitors back and forth...