When someone commits a crime in Chicago, everybody pays -- literally:

Taxpayers have shelled out an estimated $5.3 billion in the past decade just to incarcerate Chicago citizens who have been convicted of felony offenses, a vast majority of which are non-violent crimes, a new analysis by NBC 5 Investigates and The Chicago Reporter reveals.

The investigation also reveals that a disproportionate amount of that money goes to incarcerate Chicagoans who hail from a small fraction of the city’s blocks. These are frequently people who repeatedly cycle in and out of prison, and who -- because they are convicted felons -- have few options to find legitimate work when they return to their already-depressed neighborhoods.

Faced with this staggering cost of repeatedly incarcerating a relatively small number of the city’s residents, a growing number of experts are now pushing for a different way to spend -- and possibly save -- some of this money.

Take the Austin neighborhood, on Chicago’s far west side. This once-middle-class community is now one of the most impoverished and crime-ridden areas of the city.  Yet it’s also one of the priciest: The Chicago Reporter / NBC 5 analysis found that taxpayers spent an estimated $644 million to house convicted criminals, just from Austin, in prison since 2000.  That’s 11 percent of prison money, spent on a neighborhood that makes up just 3.5 percent of the city’s population.

"Every time the police looked at you wrong -- penitentiary, penitentiary, penitentiary," says Michael Flowers, a resident of Austin who has gone to prison seven times in the past ten years. 

See more investigative reports from NBCChicago.com 

Like other ex-cons, Flowers says whatever job training and education he received in prison simply wasn’t enough to make a difference when he got out. Many of the storefronts lining Austin’s streets are boarded up and the surviving businesses aren’t necessarily clamoring to hire convicted felons. 

As a result, these ex-cons often see a life of crime as the only real way to make any money.

"These guys are going to come back to the neighborhood," said Angela Caputo, who spearheaded the NBC 5 / Chicago Reporter’s block-by-block analysis of prison costs in Chicago. "They don’t want to spend their whole lives looking over their shoulders, but there’s really nothing for them to do."

"They need to see other options," said David Olson, a professor of criminal justice at Loyola University in Chicago. "But they also need to be provided with the skills and the tools in order to achieve those options."

Olson said that over the past 30 years, too much money has been spent incarcerating the (often non-violent) criminals from neighborhoods like Austin.  A smarter use of that money, he says, would be to give these convicted felons a new direction when they get out of prison. 

"They’ll continue cycling in and out of these correctional facilities, usually until either they age out of their criminal activity, or when the types of services that they really need are provided to them," he said.

That’s where people like Pastor Reginald Bachus have begun to step in. Bachus, whose Friendship Baptist Church is located in the midst of Austin’s crime-riddled neighborhood, decided if regular businesses wouldn’t hire ex-cons and felons, he would. 

Bachus formed the Friendship Community Development Corporation, which pays some of Austin’s ex-cons to maintain 28 bank-owned homes in the neighborhood that are currently going through foreclosure.

That means someone like Darnell Horton, an Austin resident who served 21 years behind bars on four convictions, can now receive a weekly paycheck. He spends his days shoveling snow around the bank-owned homes with his friend, Bruno Carter, a fellow Austin ex-con who also works for Pastor Bachus’ corporation. 

"It keeps me motivated to get up in the morning and do an honest day’s pay and take care of my family," said Carter.

"They show up every day, on time, and get the job done," said Pastor Bachus. "We’ve had no complaints. There are a lot of good people out there who are willing to do [this kind of work] -- if they have the opportunity.”

The same goes for Flowers, who now lives in transitional housing in Austin, and who says he’s done with his previous life of "penitentiary, penitentiary, penitentiary." 

Flowers hopes to convince local banks, along with city officials, to hire ex-cons to not just maintain Austin’s foreclosed homes, but to actually rehabilitate them. To many, that’s a much smarter way to spend Chicago taxpayers’ money.

For more information on the NBC5/Chicago Reporter investigation, read Angela Caputo's "Cell Blocks" story, as well as her story on the financial effects of Illinois' newly enhanced drug laws, in the March/April issue of The Chicago Reporter.

NBC5Investigates and The Chicago Reporter team up occasionally to bring you investigative stories about poverty and race in the Chicago area.  To find more Chicago Reporter stories, visit their website.

No, thousands of "crackheads" aren't going to start flooding America's streets Tuesday.

That's just one of several myths that have surrounded the U.S. Sentencing Commission's vote in June to make federal sentence reductions retroactive for current prisoners convicted of crack possession or use.

What happens Tuesday is that some eligible federal prisoners who have petitioned for reduced sentences under rules Congress passed last year can begin being released. Those rules sought to address a disparity that meant crack offenders were given the same mandatory five-year minimum sentence as were offenders in possession of 100 times as much powder cocaine.

Since the so-called 100:1 ratio was imposed in 1986 — shortly after the cocaine-related death of college basketball star Len Bias — it has come to be widely regarded as racially discriminatory. That's because the great majority of those convicted of crack possession are African-American — about 84 percent, according to Justice Department statistics. By contrast, African-Africans make up only about 30 percent of those convicted of possession of powder cocaine.

In June, the Sentencing Commission voted unanimously to redress what it called the "fundamental unfairness" of the old law by allowing prisoners convicted before it was changed to seek to reduce their sentences to be in line. 

The new policy applies only to those convicted in federal court — the tens of thousands of crack cocaine convicts in state prisons aren't affected. And it effectively applies only to those federal prisoners convicted after 2007, when the Sentencing Commission similarly allowed federal crack prisoners to seek retroactive reductions after a different adjustment of the guidelines.

That's a narrow subsection, comprising prisoners convicted in federal court of crack possession since the last adjustment. The commission projects it covers about 12,000 inmates in 116 federal prisons across the country.

Not all of those 12,000 prisoners will have their sentences reduced. For one thing, there's no way to know how many will actually seek reductions, particularly those who are near the ends of their sentences anyway. 

And the reduction isn't automatic; prisoners must go before federal judges, allowing for potentially dangerous or violent offenders to be screened out. When the courts went through the same process three years ago, they rejected more than a third of petitioners. 

The average reduction is projected to be about three years. Even with that reduction, the average sentence will still be about 10 years; that means many of those who win sentence reductions will still have several more years to serve.

• U.S. Sentencing Commission statement on new guidelines (.pdf)

All told, projections are that between 1,000 and 2,000 prisoners across the country will be eligible for immediate release when the policy takes effect Tuesday.

History does tell us that at least some of them will re-offend. But if the 2008 release is any indication, it won't be because they were let out early.

Source: U.S. Sentencing Commission, May 2011

Federal statistics show no difference in recidivism between crack defendants who were released early under a 2007 program and those who finished their sentences.

In May, the Sentencing Commission published its analysis of what happened to the approximately 16,000 prisoners who went free when their sentences were reduced after the earlier policy went into effect in March 2008. It compared their outcomes against those of a similar number of crack cocaine offenders who completed their sentences.

Over the two-year period, 30 percent of the early releases were arrested again for a new crime, the statistics show.

And what about the control group? More of them — 33 percent — were arrested again. 

It's tempting to say the statistics show that early release makes crack offenders less likely to re-offend, but in fact the difference is within the statistical margin of error. What it does show is that there's no appreciable difference in recidivism between the two groups. (See chart above.)

• Read the entire U.S. Sentencing Commission analysis (.pdf)

(Regardless of whether they are released early or not, crack offenders are about half as likely to be arrested again as are federal criminal offenders overall, 59 percent of whom the Justice Department says are re-arrested within two years of release.)

More reality check: The new policy doesn't, in fact, wipe out the disparity in cocaine sentencing. It's the result of a compromise as Congress debated the new sentencing guidelines last year. True, the crack possession-to-powder possession isn't a whopping 100:1 anymore. But it's still 18:1 — meaning you can have 18 times more powder cocaine than crack in your possession and still wind up with the same minimum sentence. 

There's one last misperception, perhaps the biggest of them of all. It's the persistent belief that the 1986 law disproportionally cracking down on crack was passed because Len Bias died after a night of crack-fueled celebration over his having been picked second in the NBA draft. His death came at the peak of the 1980s concern over crack and its role in drug gang violence that drove homicide rates into the hundreds a year in several major cities.

But Len Bias did not die from smoking crack cocaine.

At their annual seminar on sentencing, federal prosecutors reported last year: "Ironically, Len Bias's death was later shown to have been from a powder cocaine overdose — not a crack cocaine overdose as initially believed."

The paper is titled "Still Haunted by Len Bias." (.pdf)