The 2,265 exonerees in the NRE database served a combined 20,080 years behind bars. That’s an enormous amount of wasted human potential.

In an accompanying and forthcoming law review article, George Washington University law professor Jeffrey Gutman looked at compensation for the wrongly convicted. Between lawsuits and state statutes that award fixed compensation for wrongful convictions, state and municipal governments have paid out $2.2 billion to exonerees. That’s about what Americans spend every year to fight indigestion . Of course, this is nowhere near the total cost of wrongful convictions. To calculate that, you’d need to look at how much it costs to investigate, convict and imprison the wrong person; the effects the wrongful conviction had on that person, his or her family, and his or her community; and any crimes the real culprit committed after authorities apprehended the wrong suspect.

More than half the exonerees in the database have never been compensated.

In states that have statutes that dictate the sum to be paid to the wrongly convicted, exonerees on average receive $69,000 per year in prison. Those who sue do better: They average more than $300,000 per year. But lawsuits are also much less predictable.

Among the states that do have compensation statutes, Gutman ranks Mississippi as the most generous, though in order to receive payment, exonerees there must also forgo their right to sue the state for civil damages. But blue states on average pay out about 50 percent more to exonerees than red states.

As is often the case with the criminal-justice system, race is a factor. Black people are more likely to be wrongly convicted — they make up 12 percent of the population but 46 percent of exonerees, and collectively represent 56 percent of the life years lost to prison. Black exonerees also spend more time in prison before they’re cleared and released (10.7 years vs. 7.4 years for white people) and receive less compensation when they get out (on average, $42,000 less per year of incarceration).