Investment Choice:
Schools or Prisons?

flag Education is investment in our society.
Prisons are the consequence of not investing.

In many studies, the Head Start program (a federal program that gives young children an educational boost) has been shown to save more than its cost by reducing other costly things such as unemployment, juvenile delinquency, poverty, crime. Virtually every politician speaks highly of it, yet it has never been fully funded. Why?

It seems that as a country we have given up on education and decided on prisons instead. In some states we are building prisons faster than schools.

I have heard some things about our country relative to others:

It looks like locking more people up and keeping them locked up longer does not reduce crime.
Perhaps you think I'm making this up. Here's a concrete example:
Since 1984 California has added 26,000 employees to the Corrections Department and reduced the number of Higher education employees by 8,000. In 1984 California's corrections budget was about half the size of the education budget; now it's about twice the education budget.

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