Robert Shepherd posted an interesting comment about where our society is willing to”throw money”:
“How well I remember George Bush senior setting the direction for decades of policy by saying “You can’t solve the education problem by throwing money at it.”
“Well, we seem to have no problem throwing money at prisons in this country. As of year-end 2011, 6.9777 million U.S. adults were “under correctional supervision,” that is, on probation, on parole, in jail, or in prison. That’s about 2.9% of the U.S. population. It’s the highest rate in the world. As of 2010, according to a Pew report, average cost of incarceration per inmate in state systems was $47,421 in California, $50,262 in Connecticut, $38,268 in Illinois, $38,383 in Maryland, $41,364 in Minnesota, $54,865 in New Jersey, $60,076 in New York. . . . You get the picture.
“We can pay on the front end to create compensatory environments for the children of the poorest in our society, or we can pay and pay and pay on the back end.
“We have to face the fact that our system is failing the children of the rural and inner city poor and that MAGICAL nostrums like standardized tests aren’t going to fix that (but, in fact, will make things much, much worse). The savage inequalities that Kozol wrote about decades ago are back with a vengeance, and until we address the poverty of kids’ communities and put a great deal of money, much more than we are now spending, into creating COMPENSATORY ENVIRONMENTS, we’re not going to make progress. Only an idiot thinks that one can make real change in the life of a child with meth- or crack-addicted parents simply by testing him or her more.
“Every child deserves a shot at a decent life. That is the promise of our Declaration of Independence. For millions of American kids, that promise is a cruel joke, but every one of those kids, every one, matters.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The California Sentencing Institute has good data on incarceration costs by county, for juvenile and adult. The counties with the most progressive policies have less recidivism and lower overall costs. http://casi.cjcj.org/.
Just to clarify, the stat refers to adults, not to the total population. Here’s the source: http://bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cpus11.pdf. Quotation from that source: “About 2.9% of adults in the U.S. (or 1 in every 34 adults) were under some form of correctional
supervision at year end 2011.”
The “Catch”, of course, lies in throwing money at Pitchmen and Pitchwomen who will throw a goodly portion of it Right Backatcha. That’s why corporate owned politicians already throw so much of the Public’s money at Prisons and Duh Fence Industry, and precisely why they are working our fingers to the bone trying to convert Education into the same sort of Payola Machine.
Compensatory Environments were well covered in the Eugene Jarecki film, The House I Live In. It is the story of our students, their families and the once vibrant communities that are no more. The trade show scene hawking products for corporate incarceration looked a lot like a trade show for corporate surveillance products or corporate school/testing products. Where can we make a fast buck?
I was not familiar with the film, Kathy. I see that it is available on Netflix. I shall order a copy. Thanks for the recommendation.
Too bad the correction system cost for Arizona is not noted.
Forgive the ignorance of the terminology: “Compensatory Environments” refers to funding for alternative education for troubled children who cannot be educated in regular classrooms?
This is a particularly timely reminder for those of us here in Philadelphia. At the time when we have a “deficit” in our school district budget of $304 million (before the band-aids applied by the city in the last few weeks) the state is spending $400 million on a new prison in Phoenixville in the Philly suburbs. It seems that the state will just jump to paying for the consequences now and forget about even pretending to provide a compensatory environment.
Another way to reduce back-end costs associated with “correctional supervision” may be to reform federal and state penal codes, and to generally rethink the War on Drugs. This wouldn’t require spending huge sums of money to reduce poverty (not that reducing poverty is not a worthy goal).
FOR PROFIT PRISONS NEED Prisoners! After all, this is a country where unfettered capitalism has gone wild and even heroes like Manning and Snowden are called enemies by the POTUS. Eek!!! I do feel very sorry for the citizens of the USA. We are being USED…big time…FOR the PROFITS of a few.
Drugs need to be treated as a health problem, not as a criminal problem. We have before us the existence proofs provided by countries like Portugal that have decriminalized drugs. They have vastly reduced their prison populations, vastly decreased the cost of enforcement, vastly decreased drug-related crime, and vastly increased their ability to identify and treat people with drug problems. Our policies have clearly, utterly failed, and it’s time to vote out of office people who do not understand this. The War on Drugs has been a jobs program for drug cartels. It’s time to end that.
I tend to agree.
You’re asking the wrong question. It should be “Which profits more: Education or Incarceration?”
Depends on the margins, I guess. Revenue-wise, education would win by a wide margin.
The really scary side of this comparison of prisons and schools is just how many of our public schools are starting to look like and behave like prisons. Take a look at the bars on doors and windows on some of our inner city schools, the fences around them, the security entrances, and the (often armed) police officers walking the halls. Observe the locker and forced backpack searches (often with drug sniffing dogs) for drugs and contraband. Read the student handbooks of even some elementary schools and observe that many of them read like a prisoners’ rules and regulations stating what is forbidden and what punishments will be administered for violating the rules.
These are things we do to OUR CHILDREN!!!
Read the book THE BLACKBOARD JUNGLE. way back in 1950’s. Already school’s with knives and gangs and DANGER….