Investment Choice:
Schools or Prisons?
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:
We have more violent crimes.
We have longer prison sentences.
We have a larger part of our population in prison.
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.