The Cost of Justice

Several weeks ago I was called up for jury selection. If you've never been, it involved a lot of people (something like 100) from all over the county being called into the Ontario Superior Court of Justice on Woolwich Street. We were run through various processes, but one thing that struck my eye was the random selection system. A lot of people were forced to take a day off work and some travelled long distances. (Other than writing this blog, I am retired and only live a five minute walk away from the Courthouse---so I got off lucky.) Yet only a small fraction of the people called up were asked to go in front of judge for a short interview in order to be chosen to be involved. (In my case, I was the very last person called up, and was chosen only as an alternative who would get called in if someone else failed to show up---which didn't happen.)  

The process of choosing the smaller number that actually got onto the jury involved paper slips put into a rotary cage and a court clerk cranking it over and then pulling out people's names one by one. 

The clerk was dressed differently, but that's how it was done. Image by Ellin Beltz, c/o Wikimedia.

This struck me as bizarre. Why call in so many people and have them wait so long, only to have a small number of their names drawn? Why not select the people at random and only call in enough individuals to be sure to get the right number? It's true that the judge asked us a couple questions, but both of which could easily have been asked on line or over the phone. 

I asked a Bailiff why the court used such an antiquated system when it would be a lot simpler to use a computer to sort out the people before they even bothered coming to the court house. His response was that "the lawyers always object---they want to see an actual piece of paper in the cage being taken out by a human being". At the time I wondered that if the money people lost by taking time off work was taken out of the lawyer's income how long they'd continue to object. This got me thinking about how much money the courts waste in other ways. 

People and politicians routinely complain bitterly about how much money gets "wasted" on helping people through things like welfare, subsidized housing, etc. But I rarely hear any of them complain about how much money gets spent (or "wasted") on our criminal justice system. I thought it might be interesting to try to figure out just how much does get spent on it.

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As I see it, there are three places where money is spent by the Justice system: the police, courts, and, prisons. Let's start with the police.

The first thing to remember is that there are four types of police: federal, provincial, municipal, and, specialized. Federal police are easy to identify: they are the RCMP. I found a financial report for the Mounties on their website, and if I'm reading it right it appears that their allocated budget comes to $3.9 billion in 2021. Looking at the OPP, their financial report says that they cost $1.1 billion in  2020. And looking at the city website, it appears that the cost of the Guelph police will come to a little under $52 million in 2021. What I'm calling "specialized" police are entities like the University of Guelph campus police, the Metrolinx "transit police", and, military police---among others. For the purposes of this article, I'm going to ignore this last category. 

Since this article is more about "back of an envelope" figures than the picky details, I'm going to just divide each of these categories by the relevant population to try to get an average cost per citizen for each entity. 

The entire population of Canada in 2021 is a little over 38 million. So if you divide the RCMP budget of $3.9 billion by 38 million, you get a figure of $103 per citizen. And there are 14.7 million people in Ontario as of 2021. Divide that into the OPP budget of $1.1 billion, and you get a cost of $75/citizen. And the population of Guelph is now something like 132,000. Divide that into the Guelph Police Services budget of $52 million and you get $394/citizen. Add them all together and you get a total of $572/citizen/year for policing.

Of course, people with different incomes (and different accountants and lawyers), pay different tax rates. Don't assume that these numbers bear any reference to your particular tax bills. But they do allow us to create a comparable number that we can use to get a handle on how much different government programs cost relative to each other. 

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Now, let's look at how much criminal courts cost. Figuring this out first requires an understanding of how criminal trials are administered. Here's a flow chart from a government website that explains the courts of Canada. 

Image c/o the Canadian government website How the Courts are Organized.

The thing to remember is that the federal government passes most of the laws, but the provincial government has the courts that try most of the criminal cases. There is a complication, however, in that courts don't just try criminal cases, they also handle things like child custody and disputes between businesses. I'm not going to try to separate out these functions from the criminal ones---and I'm not even sure that we need to do so, as this too is a cost that is born by society. Moreover, family and civil court decisions have results that are imposed upon individuals against their will and which if not complied with have criminal consequences. For example, if you don't pay child support or a lawsuit judgment you can have your income garnisheed or assets seized.

The latest info I could find about the cost of Ontario courts are these pie charts from the Biannual Report 2008-2009|Ontario Court of Justice.

Sorry about the date, but this was published in 2011, which might give you an idea of how "tardy" these reports can be.

Since the report is so old and there is such a big increase from 2007 to 2009, I'm going to round up the number to $150 million. Divide that by the Ontario population of 14.7 million, and we get an average of about $10. That seems relatively small compared to the cost of policing. (This might explain the stories I often read about how under-funded the courts seem to be.)

Since most trials are held on the provincial level, I won't bother trying to add in a federal cost. That would probably mostly involve things like the Supreme Court---which only handles a fraction of appeals. 

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Let's now look at the price we pay for prisons. First off, let's be clear about my language. I am using the word "prison" to mean a place where the government locks you up against your will. It's the "crowbar hotel". That's an "ordinary English" term instead of a technical one. When you look at the website they instead talk about things like "Jails", "Treatment Centres", "Detention Centres", and, "Correctional Centres". I'm not going to get into the differences between them. Suffice it to say that each of these types of institutions may have slightly different goals, but at basis all are about dramatically limiting people's freedom to move out in the world.

According to the Parliamentary Budget Office's 2018 report, Update on Costs of Incarceration, the federal government spent about $1.6 billion on incarcerating something like 14,000 prisoners. This comes out to about $110,000 per inmate. Divide this by the population of Canada, 38 million, and we get about $42/citizen. 

But that's just federal prisons. The majority of inmates are in provincial prisons. 

I found a report by the Ontario Auditor General that says:

On average during 2018/19, over 7,400 adults
18 years and older were in custody every day in the
province’s adult correctional institutions and the
Ministry spent $817 million in that fiscal year to run
the institutions. In this report, we use the term “cor-
rectional institutions” to encompass jails, detention
centres, correctional centres and treatment centres.

As you can see above, she uses the term "correctional institution" where I would use "prison". I use my term because it is clear to me that the inmates are being imprisoned, but far from clear that their behaviour is being "corrected". Other than that "tom-eh-toes tom-ah-toes". 

In addition, it's important to remember that lots of people spend considerably less than a year in jail either because they are sentenced to a period of time less than a year or because they are in jail for a short period of time while waiting for either bail or trial.

Having said that, it's easy to divide 7,400 into $817 million and get the cost of $110,000/inmate year. But let's divide that $817 million by the Ontario population, or, 14.7 million. The result is something like $56/citizen/year, on average. 

Add the federal cost per person of $42/person to the provincial cost of $56/person, and we end up with a combined cost of $98/citizen/year. 

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I put a lot of work into researching this stuff. It might not be obvious because a lot of effort includes wading through websites and reading government pdfs to only discover that there's nothing there I can use. I also have to spend a lot of time trying to assimilate complex policy issues before I can try to come up with a simple way of explaining them to readers.

Anyway, if you like the results and you can afford it, why not subscribe or throw something in the tip jar? Pay Pal and Patreon make it easy to do.

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Add together my "back of the envelope" estimates of policing ($572) plus courts ($10), and, Prisons ($98), and we get a total cost of $680 paid by the average citizen of Guelph for the criminal justice system.   

It's a difficult thing to figure out what the average Canadian pays in taxes for a variety of reasons. First of all, there are different levels of government: federal, provincial, and, municipal. Secondly, there are different types of taxes such as income, sin, sales, etc. It's also important to realize that we live in a time of growing wealth stratification, which means that average numbers are less useful than median ones. (For example, in 2015 Statistics Canada estimates that the median household income was $70,336---which is an example of why we always have to double-check Fraser Institute numbers---see below---because they have a tendency to be "massaged" to push their particular message. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a median total tax per household number, so I was stuck using their number instead.)

This graphic clearly shows the difference between median and average. It comes from a website titled The Balance, and I'm using it under the "Fair Dealing" provision of our Copyright laws.

Another complexity comes from the way people record taxes. Because most couples both work, and there are significant tax issues around joint tax filing, financial reporting routinely talks about "household" incomes and taxes. A "household" is two or more people who live together (generally two adults and maybe one or more children)---but there are single parent households too. This raises problems because I've been dividing costs by the population instead of households. 

It would require far too much digging to come up with a more accurate number, so for the sake of this article I'm just going to divide the per household number by two and suggest that that is the "average" taxes paid by Canadians. I'm interested in "orders of magnitude" here, so I think that these "short cuts" are legitimate. (You will make up your own mind about the validity of the results.)

According to the Fraser Institute, in 2018 "tax freedom day" arrived on June 10th. That's a "razzle dazzle" way of saying that:

In 2018, we estimate the average Canadian family (consisting of two or more people) will earn $115,724 in income and pay $50,464 in taxes—or 43.6 per cent of its income. 

With all the caveats I mentioned above, I will cut this in half and say that the average Canadian paid $25,232 in 2018. That would mean that the $680 I said the average Guelphite paid for the criminal justice system comes out to a little under 3% of his or her taxes.

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That's a starting point for a comparison, but now I want to pick up that old "bugaboo" from politics: welfare.

I want to talk about this because I can remember that one of the things that gets a small number of voters most "riled up" and angry is any suggestion that the government should spend more money on helping the poor. (When I ran for office it was the only subject that I could raise while going door-to-door that I thought could result in my being assaulted.) I don't think most people think about it much one way or the other, but I suspect that's more because politicians have learned to not mention the subject. It is, however, something that conservatives have used to
whip their base into a frenzy at times. Premier Mike Harris, in particular, rode into office---at least partially---on the backs of the poor. 

There are complications. In fact, there isn't any such thing as "welfare" anymore. Instead the Orwellian title "Ontario Works" has been substituted. (I say "Orwellian" because I suspect that the fraction of people who use this program are exactly the same fraction of the public who find it hardest to actually be employed.) There are other programs as well, such as rent geared to income housing, special programs like the Mayor's Task Force on Homelessness, the safe injection facilities, etc. 

Advocates of a Guaranteed Annual Income would argue that it makes most sense for people to just get money themselves instead of creating bureaucracies. The idea is that people just need enough to afford a place to live rather than hiring a lot of people to build and administer affordable housing. Others suggest that a lot of lower income people need "minders" because their issues that keep them from finding good jobs would also result in the being soon parted from that guaranteed income provided by the government---if they were just given a bunch of cash. I suspect that there are good arguments on both sides and some individuals would benefit more one system than the other---and vice-versa. The main take-away for this article is that help for the poor isn't just the dole anymore. Instead, it encompasses a wide range of services too----which in Guelph's case is called "social services". 

Yet another complexity is that while the majority of social services are consumed in Guelph and paid for by the province, they are administered by the County. To that end, I've pulled up a pie chart from the Wellington County budget of 2021. 

As you can see, social services eats up 40% of the $231.7 million county budget, or $92.7 million dollars.

It needs to be said that this isn't how much the county raises in taxes, however. That figure is only $108.8 million. The difference is paid by city of Guelph and the Provincial and Federal governments. Luckily for the purposes of this article, the old saw that "there's only one tax-payer" works in my favour. All the money comes from people in the County---no matter whether it's property, sales, income, sin, or whatever tax you can think of. 

There are 222,726 people who live in Wellington county, including the city of Guelph. If you divide $92.7 million by that number, you get $416/citizen/year. Compare that to the figure of  $680 that I arrived at by estimating the combined police, court, and, prison costs and you could say that we only spend 60% as much on Social Services as we spend on criminal justice. 

I don't want readers to put too much stock on the numbers I've manufactured above. I'm not an expert on any of these subjects, and I'm just trying to dig out the sort of context and background information on a subject that politicians rarely talk about. Moreover, if they do, from what I hear, the legacy media tends to not report it. (As one ex-Cabinet minister told me, "Once I start getting into details you can see all the reporters put down their pencils and stop listening".)

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Even if you believe that the machinations that I've gone through in the above has at least rough value to understand the emphasis we are putting on one part of the government's job over another, there are still other important complexities.

One issue that comes to my mind is just how many people are "benefiting" from each of these branches of the government. As I mentioned above, there seem to be 7,400 person/years each year in the entire Ontario prison system. This gives us some idea of the magnitude of what is happening in the criminal justice system. But it's important to remember that the police don't charge, arrest, or, investigate every crime that comes to their attention. Moreover, not every person they charge gets convicted. And not every person convicted ends up in prison---there are things like house arrest and probation. Finally, the police don't even spend all their time investigating crime. A lot of what they do involves things like public education, monitoring traffic, and, just being "visible" in order to keep a lid on unlawful activity. 

Having said all of that, it might be useful to come up with a comparable number for social services. About three years ago I went to the trouble of finding how many units of social housing exist in Guelph. It involved a little digging, but the number I came up with was a little under 2,500---just for Guelph. That's 7,400 "clients" of the prison system versus 2,500 units (lots of these have more than one person living in them) in Guelph alone. Looking at this disparity of needs versus resources, I am tempted to suggest perhaps society should redirect some of the money it currently spends on the criminal justice system towards social services.

I'm not about to do that, however. My understanding of bureaucracies is that there is a hierarchy of programs within any institution, and if they have to cut programs they generally cut muscle and bone long before they get around to the fat. What I'm talking about, for example, is that if a police department was forced to cut it's budget it would probably cut de-escalation training instead of the SWAT team. (The plausible argument that could be made would be that the latter is more of the "core mandate" of policing than the former---but from what I've read SWAT teams tend to be expensive and rarely necessary.) Similarly with the courts---cut their funding and things like sentencing circles and special drug courts would be the first to go.

Moreover, I don't think the debate should be about forcing judges and police to fight with social workers and psychiatrists over scarce government money. Instead, I think it would be more productive to look at two other things: getting new revenue sources from somewhere else (ie: make the rich pay a bit more taxes) and developing new government policies that deal more with the core problems that the poor face. For example, many of the problems associated with addiction to opioids stem from their being illegal. If there was a legal, safe, and, cheap source it would dramatically reduce overdoses and dramatically cut the costs of addiction. This would get many addicts off the streets and into productive jobs and away from prostitution or petty theft. It would also help the police by ending their "whack-a-mole" job of combating narcotics trafficking.

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When I started this exercise I hoped I'd come up with a startling figure that showed the government "wastes" huge amounts of money on the court system, police, and, prisons that could be much better used for social services. Instead I found that while there are probably individual situations where money could be more wisely spent, I didn't see a huge disparity. I suspect that the criminal justice deals with a lot fewer individuals than social services---but my take-away is that looting its budget would hardly end poverty in Canada.

Having written the above, I do think that it is a useful procedure to walk citizens through the relative costs of different government programs. If voters don't have a
"feel" for the relative price that they pay for different services, they really can't make an informed choice when they choose between different party platforms during an election. 

That's enough for this week. Enjoy the relaxed rules around social life. I am! I went out to a restaurant with friends a couple weeks back---for the first time in over a year and a half! We aren't out of the woods yet, but with any luck that glimpse of light won't turn out to be a mirage. 

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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!