Moving the few hundred remaining prisoners at Guantanamo should be something conservatives rally behind. The reason for this is in the numbers:
A Bureau of Prisons spokesman on Monday revised upwards the cost of housing a captive in federal detention, days after the bureau said it spends a tiny fraction of what the military spends at Guantanamo Bay.
The new figure — $27,251 a year per federal prisoner compared to $650,000 per captive at the U.S. base in Cuba — is still a tiny fraction.
So it costs 23 times more to keep someone at Gitmo as it does to keep them in a federal prison. Considering the $27,251 number is an average, I’m sure it does cost more for maximum security prisoners, where the Gitmo people would go, but I highly doubt that it will cost anywhere near the $650,000 figure.