#doing the math behind the scenes on how much their bills were previously being subsidized by the prison has haunted me ever since!

[unpretty]

accountant thoughts:

so there's a certain amount of fixed costs associated with water systems and wastewater treatment, right? like. sewage. making human shit less toxic. keeping water clean and then getting that water into houses. there are ways that costs increase the more the system gets used, but it would also cost money if it just sat there. it might even cost more money, because the systems aren't designed to shut down and just sit there. if the whole city were abandoned except for one house, and it became the only house served by the water department and the sewer system, there would still be all that base cost associated with the various systems and plants and so on. i'm simplifying because i don't actually know how all that works.

anyway. so from a financial perspective, water and wastewater treatment get cheaper the more people you have being served by the system. because that's more people you can divide the cost up by. that's how the fixed cost works. the fixed cost is less per person the more people there are.

a lot of prisons in the usa are in small towns and rural areas. that's how prison gerrymandering works. you take people out of the cities where they actually live, and you stick them in a prison in bumfuck, and then you say "i represent the 5,000 residents of bumfuck" while ignoring that 4,000 of those residents are in a prison and can't vote.

prisons use a lot of water!

so when they're doing the budgets in a small town, if they say, "here is how much we think it's going to cost to run for the next year, here is how many gallons of water we estimate being used, we will divide the cost by thousands of gallons and that's what we're going to charge", what impact does a prison have? what if a prison represents half of all water usage? how much higher would residential bills be without the prison there? is it a private prison, or is it the state that's paying for that prison's water usage? at what point can it be said that in certain rural areas infrastructure is subsidized by the state through the imprisonment of people primarily from urban areas where infrastructure is allowed to fail