Education Falls Below Prisons In State Budget

[flashl]

Study: Incarceration Costs Can Undercut Other Priorities

Connecticut is one of four states in the nation spending more money on its prison system than on higher education, according to a Pew Charitable Trusts study released Thursday.

...

In Connecticut, taxpayers pay $1.03 toward prisons for every $1 spent on higher education. In the Northeast as a whole, from 1987 until the present, inflation-adjusted spending on higher education dropped 5.5 percent while prison spending rose 61 percent, according to the Pew findings.

“We didn't just wake up this morning and find ourselves here,” said Adam Gelb, project director for Pew's Public Safety Performance project. “This is a milestone that the nation has been approaching for a long time. Getting tough on criminals has gotten tough on taxpayers.”

...

Fleischmann believes that if more people had access to higher education, fewer of them would be in prison.

Conneticut - The Day

[BleedingHeartPatriot]

1. Living in an incarceration society. Sucks to be us.

:-(

[midnight]

2. This is pretty grim. We spend more money to incarcerate

than educate. This is the fastest way to dumb down a country.

[eppur_se_muova]

3. Blame it on that No Inmate Left Behind program. :sarcasm:

"Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won't fatten the dog."
- Mark Twain, 11/23/1900

[BleedingHeartPatriot]

4. What an amazing quote. Thanks for posting it.

[Marc Bousquet]

5. Both are increasingly privatized

The trend toward privatization of prisons and privatization of higher ed are connected. Both are really locations of profound human misery: with 70% of high school grads entering some form of higher ed, usually a degraded form, the motive is vocational, often nakedly the avoidance of otherwise-certain immiseration.

Higher education isn't a panacea for inequality. With greater dignity and fairness in employment/citizenship, there may well be less of a clientele for higher education and less public spending on it (or at least less of a market for the greed merchants at Corinthian, U Phoenix, etc.)