Prisons Are More Important Than Schools

I hope you disagree with the title of this article, because I certainly do.  However, if you look at the amount of money spent on both institutions over the past 33 years, there is no question that among politicians, and perhaps some other members of our society, it is more important to fund prisons than it is to fund education.  When one looks at how much a state spends on a prisoner compared to how much it spends on a child attending school, more money is spent in this country on the prisoner than the child.  According to a report by the personal finance site GoBankingRates, fifteen states spend at least $27,000 more per prisoner than they do per student, with California having the biggest gap, spending $64,642 per inmate compared to $11,495 per student.  That difference of $53, 146 is astounding!  In Iowa, the cost of educating a student is a bit under $10,000, while the cost spent on each inmate is over $30,000.  Just think what kind of education could be provided to our young people if those dollar amounts were flipped!  Or for that matter, find the average and fund them the same!

There is no question that our nation has a problem with incarceration, and perhaps some of the conversation about prison and sentencing reform you hear about every so often will come to fruition in the near future.  It is astounding that in the richest country in the world, while our country accounts for 4.4% of the world’s population, it also accounts for 22% of the world’s prison population.  The crazy thing about that statistic is that there are many other countries in the world that have far more restrictions on their citizenry and yet, do not have as many people confined.  Maybe even crazier is that in the United States, incarceration rates have tripled in the last thirty years despite crime rates falling!  How does that add up?  We are spending an incredible amount of taxpayer money, in some respects keeping for-profit, private prisons very much in the black, and at the same time short-changing the education of young people.

Within this inequity of spending, there exists some very interesting correlations between education and incarceration, students and prisoners.  The most obvious is that uneducated people are much more likely to end up in prison.  According to the U.S. Department of Education, 66% of state prison inmates have not graduated from high school, and for one demographic group in our country, black men aged 20-24, those without a high school diploma are more likely to be in jail or prison than to have a job.  It is not complicated, earn a high school diploma and stay out of jail!  Heck, we have examples in our own community of this!  Dropout of school, do something stupid because you do not have access to a good job, go to jail.  We read about these individuals in the police report all of the time!  According to former U.S. Secretary of Education John King, a 10% increase in high school graduation would result in a 9% decrease in criminal arrest rates.  Where should we put our money if we truly want to impact our future?

Another interesting statistic is that in our country it takes one prison guard to supervise an average of 5.3 prisoners, while each American teacher supervises an average of 20.8 students.  Of course that makes it more expensive simply looking at labor costs.  Toss in the fact that there are extreme shortages of educators in some parts of this country, even to the extent that teaching positions are going unfilled, and can you see where our focus is at?  Based on this, our nation places a higher priority on people giving attention to prisoners than to students.  It is more important that we have a lower guard to prisoner ratio than teacher to student!  How about we work to level that out a little bit?  I’m not saying move those prison guards into schools (though some may argue that would be helpful!), but I suspect being a teacher would be much more attractive if they did not have to deal with as many of the problems that they face on a daily basis.  That could be dealt with if schools had resources for mental health professionals and counselors to provide services to young people who bring all kinds of social and emotional issues into the building each day.

When one in three Americans of working age have a criminal record, that is a problem.  Not only does it create barriers to employment, it certainly does not bode well for an economy in need of workers.  Statistics tell us that if more people graduate from high school, fewer will become criminals, the number of prisoners will decline, and less money will be needed to operate jails and prisons.  So how about we invest up front, allocate money to education and mental health programs, and give our young people an opportunity to earn a quality education, rather than continuing to see our costly prison system expand.  Makes sense to me.