The cost of running Guantánamo Bay: $13 million per prisoner via nytimes
GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — Holding Nazi war criminal Rudolf Hess as the lone prisoner in Germany’s Spandau Prison in 1985 cost an estimated $1.5 million in today’s dollars. The per-prisoner bill in 2012 at the “supermax” facility in Colorado, home to some of the highest-risk prisoners in the United States, was $78,000.
Because of the relative isolation of its location on a U.S. Navy base on Cuba’s southeast coast, the military assigns around 1,800 troops to the detention center, or 45 for each prisoner. The troops work out of three prison buildings, two top-secret headquarters, at least three clinics and two compounds where prisoners consult their lawyers. Some also stand guard across the base at Camp Justice, the site of the war court and parole board hearing room.
The 2013 report put the total cost of building and operating the prison since 2002 at $5.2 billion through 2014, a figure that now appears to have risen to past $7 billion. It has been clear for years that there is no political consensus to end detention operations at Guantánamo Bay and move the remaining prisoners to the United States.
The Defense Department provides all of those things for the military personnel at Guantánamo, mostly National Guard forces and reservists who come and go on nine-month rotations. Soldiers handle the prisoners on the cell blocks or in transit, monitor them by security camera and patrol perimeters. In addition to the troops, the prison employs Defense Department contract linguists, intelligence analysts, consultants, laborers, information technology professionals and other government workers. In 2014, that civilian workforce numbered 300.
With the exception of an Army security force of fewer than 300 soldiers who live in prefabricated containers within the prison zone, most troops who work in the prison complex live on the naval base. In contrast to the naval base, the prison zone resembles a battlefield-style operation. It has watchtowers and Humvees and dirt roads and a series of permanent and semipermanent prison facilities, all of them built since 2002 and surrounded by razor wire that rusts in the salt air.
Adding those “manpower costs” of $108,000 a year for each of the 1,800 troops brings the total figure to more than $540 million. Nearly all of the base supplies — like family household shipments, frozen pizza dough for the bowling alley food court and rental cars for the base commissary — arrive twice monthly on a government contract barge from Florida. A refrigerated cargo plane brings fresh fruit and vegetables weekly.
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