Prison vs. education spending reveals California's priorities

[Peter Farruggio <pfarr@cal.berkeley.edu>]

Prison vs. education spending reveals California's priorities

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/05/29/EDGGTP3F291.DTL

Maya Harris

Tuesday, May 29, 2007

It has been said that a government's budget isn't only a statement of 
priorities, but also a reflection of a society's values. California's 
proposed budget reveals skewed priorities and hollow values.

For the first time, and unique among large states, California will 
soon spend more on its prisons than on its public universities. It 
has been projected that over the next five years, the state's budget 
for locking up people will rise by 9 percent annually, compared with 
its spending on higher education, which will rise only by 5 percent. 
By the 2012-2013 fiscal year, $15.4 billion will be spent on 
incarcerating Californians, as compared with $15.3 billion spent on 
educating them. Yet, despite this historic increase in prison 
funding, leading legislators -- including supporters of the increase 
-- and even Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's office agree that this is 
simply throwing good money after bad, given the rank mismanagement 
plaguing California's corrections system.

But they'll spend the money anyway.

More prison spending will mean better pay for the highest paid, most 
politically influential prison personnel in the nation, as well as 
more prisons, but no one is certain it will result in a better 
corrections system.

There's no uncertainty, however, about the benefits that flow from 
investing in education. Nothing predicts future success better than a 
good education, and nothing guarantees failure more than the lack of 
one. "Today, education is perhaps the most important function of 
state and local governments," the U.S. Supreme Court stated in its 
landmark Brown vs. Board of Education decision. "It is the very 
foundation of good citizenship ... . In these days, it is doubtful 
that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is 
denied the opportunity of an education."

Studies have ratified the truth of those words, more than 50 years 
later. According to a recent report by Northeastern University, the 
median annual earnings in 2004-2005 of young black men with a 
bachelor's degree were 2.5 times those of high school graduates and 
14.5 times higher than those of high school dropouts.

The correlation between the lack of educational opportunities and 
imprisonment could not be more direct. The same study found that 
18-to-24-year-old male high school dropouts had an incarceration rate 
31 times that of males who graduated from a four-year college. If 
you're a young black male with no high school diploma, it's worse: 
You're 60 times more likely to end up behind bars than your 
classmates who earned a bachelor's degree.

Despite these realities, we not only continue to feed the prison 
system at the expense of funding education, we've also blurred the 
lines separating the educational and criminal justice systems, 
creating a school-to-prison pipeline with a predictable and steady 
flow. Police have become an increasing presence in our public 
elementary, middle and high schools. Schools are spending millions of 
dollars to hire their own police forces or contracting with local 
authorities. Kids are routinely searched before being allowed into 
the building, under surveillance by video cameras in hallways and 
subjected to random searches of their backpacks and lockers.

Behavior that used to warrant a trip to the principal's office can 
now result in a trip to jail on charges of assault. Kids not old 
enough to drive have been arrested for behavior ranging from throwing 
a temper tantrum to talking during school assemblies and violating 
the dress code. It's kids of color who bear the disproportionate 
brunt of these zero-tolerance policies.

Something is clearly wrong when the government's most effective 
affirmative-action program is the preference people of color receive 
when entering not college, but the criminal-justice system, and when 
the state's budget proposes to build up prisons instead of universities.

Who is going to make it right? Even public officials who know this 
budget priority is wrongheaded refuse to fight it, preferring to 
pander to prison personnel and afraid of appearing "soft on crime." 
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once observed: "Cowardice asks the 
question, 'Is it safe?' Expediency asks the question, 'Is it 
politic?' Vanity comes along and asks the question, 'Is it popular?' "

"But," King added, "Conscience asks the question 'Is it right?' "

Perhaps we should ask our legislators and the governor the same question.

Maya Harris is the executive director of the ACLU of Northern California.


This article appeared on page B - 5 of the San Francisco Chronicle