California to Spend More on Prisons than on Higher Education
May 21st, 2007Via: San Francisco Chronicle:
As the costs for fixing the state’s troubled corrections system rocket higher, California is headed for a dubious milestone — for the first time the state will spend more on incarcerating inmates than on educating students in its public universities.
Based on current spending trends, California’s prison budget will overtake spending on the state’s universities in five years. No other big state in the country spends close to as much on its prisons compared with universities.
But California has all but guaranteed that prisons will eat up an increasingly large share of taxpayer money because of chronic failures in a system that the state is now planning to expand.
Under a new state law, California will spend $7.4 billion to build 40,000 new prison beds, and that is over and above the current annual operating budget of more than $10 billion. Interest payments alone on the billions of dollars of bonds that will be sold to finance the new construction will amount to $330 million a year by 2011 — all money that will not be available for higher education or other state priorities.
It’s a pretty sad commentary on California’s priorities especially when we consider that a majority of those incarcerated are “non-violent” drug offenders.
Mother Jones has an interesting interactive prison atlas worth looking at. You will notice that California is “not” an anomaly. Sadly, many other states are beyond California in other sectors such as Incarceration Rate.
http://www.motherjones.com/news/special_reports/prisons/atlas.html
“From 1984 to 1996, California built 21 new prisons, and only one new university.”
Source: Ambrosio, T. & Schiraldi, V., “Trends in State Spending, 1987-1995”, Executive Summary-February 1997 (Washington DC: The Justice Policy Institute, 1997).
“California state government expenditures on prisons increased 30% from 1987 to 1995, while spending on higher education decreased by 18%.”
Source: National Association of State Budget Officers, 1995 State Expenditures Report (Washington DC: National Association of State Budget Officers, 1996).
“– A major cause of overcrowding is a parole system that sends far more released inmates back to prison than other states. Decisions by corrections officials and politicians to de-emphasize rehabilitation programs, lengthen parole periods and send violators back to prison instead of giving them treatment have produced a return rate of about 60 percent, the nation’s highest.”
source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/07/03/MNGLMDIMOT1.DTL
one thing that appears to be missing here is the flip side economic benefits (to be read as: pocket lining) on established prison populations. for example: do the plans for these facilities include call centers for inmate productivity? will they be competitive with India in rate charges per hour? meet the new outsource, same as the old outsource….
California already spends more than most, if not all, states in the Union on supposed “education”. Last time I read that the state that spent the least actually had the highest SAT scores so there is no correlation between money and results.
Cali is big on political mongering and social engineering in the classroom. Its not about knowledge but creating a “mindset” albeit ignorant and lockstep with corporate “needs”. Think about it. Kids are filled with nonsense, can’t read or write, and then are “enabled” by a system that says there is no accountability for being a perpetual “man/woman-child”.
This same ignorant society then dutifully, through a manipulative guilt mongering political class, doles out money to illegals or other ignoramuses thus encouraging a flood of people looking for handouts. Many are hard working but many are criminals (just check the stats on the prison population….) and many illiterate products of public skrewl end up there as well. And the wheel turns and more prisons are built (more than any place else on the planet) ad-infinitum.
Its the pot calling the kettle black to ask for more lucre when its already a failure. Besides, I view the prison-industrial-complex the same as the education or tax system. Its built to foster greater dependence and control, building and perpetuating a system that will dig ever deeper, like a societal “tick”, into the culture and inevitably your wallet.
I am employed by the California Department of Corrections. 20% of the budget is for medical and psycological treatment for the inamtes. Most of this treatment is to improve their quality of life- not life threatening treatment. If you would like to tour contact pio officer. one last thing teaching inmates to repair cars and the imate is spending the rest of his life in prison
I think that what you’ve got here are the companies who build and contract services for these prisons thinking, “Why allow so many poor Mexicans to waste away in Mexico when tax payers could be paying us to lock those Mexicans up in shiny new prisons???”
What percentage of California’s prison population is made up of illegals?
I’m sure the answer is… A lot.
Saw a great 2 hour documentary on a prison in California (Salinas Valley State) via the BBC, just recently. It was a fairly new prison, nice and clean, but already so badly overcrowded that the gymnasium was being used to house hundreds of convicts, bunk beds lined up in rows down the middle. It followed a couple of new arrivals, and their adjustment period.
Each convict group (‘northern mexicans’, ‘blacks’, ‘whites’, ‘southern mexicans’, etc…not my terms, but those of the prisoners themselves) controlled their section of the big open space, and simply walking through the wrong are could mean death (and did). Based on the single gymnasium presented, illegal immigrants made up nearly 90% of the prison population.
Well, let them put EVERYONE in prison. And then figure out who they are going to send to Iraq, Iran, Vietnam, etc. etc. etc. to fight and die in their endless wars.