Policing and Corrections Spending by State

Those are two very different questions because prisons are a state expense and police are a municipal expense. Connecticut's big cities, which are small compared to other cities, have this weird fiscal relationship with the suburbs surrounding them because most of their revenue sources are property taxes. The cities are where most of the property-tax-exempt public services are, such as the state capitol, hospitals, methadone clinics and all those things that serve the region are in the city and don't generate revenue, so all of our big cities are tax-starved. Because of that, there's a complicated formula for the state to pay cities back, but the state never lives up to the modest formula in terms of replacing lost revenue. It's called PILOT, payment in lieu of taxes.

When you talk about any big spending that the state does, you could say that's money that could be going to the cities to make up for the services that we provide for free to the suburbs.

In Connecticut, our cities have some of the highest ratios of police to population in the nation. Hartford is more than double the national average. All the cities are always cash-strapped. We spend a ton of money on the police as compared to any social service except education.

In the case of California, something that might be helpful to remember is that California is only blue because of San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego. The state is huge and the vast majority of it is rural, which is not something outsiders imagine. The rurality of California is more Black and brown than people imagine, overwhelmingly because of immigration demographics; it's Latinx.

It has an effect in that the state budget provides a blueprint for local budgets to then put forward their own police-centric budgets. For example, I'm in Salinas, California, which has a population of a little over 155,000. It's a pretty big town, but it's in a rural valley.

One category that might be helpful to answer this question is poverty rates. You'll notice that a vast majority of rural areas, if not all of them, have a poverty rate that's much higher than the national average, which is 11.8%. I'm sure it's going up with the COVID crisis. Salinas and Salinas Valley have continuously been in the 17-24% poverty rate. In Salinas, the budget that just passed gives 45% of the city's budget to the Salinas Police Department. Before COVID the city was facing a $6 million deficit because of money mismanagement. We're now facing a $19 million deficit despite a lot of community organizing.

They can vote in their primary and general elections, but I think that's probably not enough. In Hartford, we have 125,000 people, but our voter turnout is extraordinarily low. Politicians like me are not responding to the fact that we may not get elected. But people respond to protests, phone calls and direct engagement.

At the local level, calling and emailing their council members. People can also look up city ordinances and see what kind of local government structure they have. A lot of people may reach out to their city's mayor because they assume she or he has all the power. If you look at the city ordinance, they may see that their town is run by a combination of a city manager and city council, then the mayor has a vote in the city council and can introduce things, but they are not the ultimate power.

It's much more effective in those city manager and council setups to contact the individual city council member for your district and to email the city manager, who a lot of people don't realize exists.

I think it's right to look at those two things as one system. Policing and imprisoning is one system of control, disenfranchisement and perpetual impoverishment. I don't think it's an accident that a lot of the folks who are talking about abolishing incarceration are also talking about abolishing police.

Sometimes it's a difficult answer and sometimes it's the easiest one. If you have a high police budget, and especially a militarized police force, you're going to have higher rates of incarceration. It also depends on the state and level of parole and probation legislation that they have, and how strict and rigid it might be.

California has some of the most strict parole and probation legislation on the books, which is why I'm not surprised that it's near the top of states that have the highest police expenditure. These are symbiotic relationships. Not only is it easier to get more of a mass of people into prison through the pervasiveness of police in low-income communities of color, but once they get out they are under constant surveillance. Even the most minor slip-up means going back to prison, and you need a police force for that.