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California Spends More on Incarceration than Education

We know lower education rates mean higher rates of incarceration:

In yesterday’s Panopticonic article — Romney Wants Fewer Teachers, Cops and Firefighters — I argued fewer teachers would lead to more crime.  Some readers commented in email there was no proof of that common sense notion, so today, I provide some hard and unavoidable facts here in Carceral Nation confirming fewer teachers create larger class sizes and larger class sizes create higher dropout rates:

Oregon’s annual dropout rate over the last decade has dipped and climbed with the number of teachers. When the number of teachers dropped to nearly 27,000 in 1998, the dropout rate hit 6.9 percent. When teacher ranks climbed to 31,000 in 2007, the dropout rate had fallen to 3.2 percent.

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Princeton or Prison?

It costs a lot of money to house prisoners in cells when the idea is no longer reformation, but rather separation and dissonant punishment:

One year at Princeton University: $37,000. One year at a New Jersey state prison: $44,000.

Prison and college “are the two most divergent paths one can take in life,” Joseph Staten, an info-graphic researcher with Public Administration, says. Whereas one is a positive experience that increases lifetime earning potential, the other is a near dead end, which is why Staten found it striking that the lion’s share of government funding goes toward incarceration.

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The Prison System Bailout Bailiwick

The business of prison building is big business, yet prisons are fast becoming a financial drain on the states that built them, as incarcerations grow at a rate greater than the prisons can be build and maintained.

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