In the last post, I talked about excessive defense spending and what we could better utilize our money for. Well let us speak on the topic of education systems and prison systems. This is a highly contested topic in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, especially during the Corbett Administration.
Now the defense spending in the United States unnecessarily high, but that is not the only aspect of the American statistics that is alarming to many people. The population of US prisons and jails is also at an all-time high. From 1980 to the present time, the prison population grew from 500,000 to a staggering 2.3 million. That number exceeds the population of Namibia by 200,000. The United States now carries the inconvenient title of possessing the largest population of incarcerated citizens. Even more ludicrous is the fact that the US accounts for 25 percent of the global prison population, yet we only possess five percent of the global population. In addition to this, the US spends approximately $70 billion annually to jail and imprison adults, hold juveniles in detention centers, and keep close supervision on 7.3 million individuals on probation or parole. This high level of spending on corrections has drained essential funding from other sources, one of the largest victims being education.
The majority of all imprisonment spending is on the state level. The funding comes from one large budget that includes other aspects like education, health care, and housing. Elementary and high school education in most states receive on average 73 percent of their funding from this source, while colleges and universities receive about half of their funding from said source. Now every nine of ten dollars that support the imprisonment systems and process are drawn from the same fund as education. The billions of dollars spent on funding prison systems has severely reduced the money available for education spending.
In the next post, we'll go more in depth with these costs, cost cuts, and the affects it has visibly had on education.
Great post overall! This post really enlightened me on the topic of how educational funding constantly gets disregarded. Also, I liked the statistic involving jails and Namibia!
ReplyDeleteI'll be looking forward to more,
Chike J.
Nice post, I just have a few questions out of curiosity. Is there any reason that so much money is being funneled into the prison systems instead of elsewhere? Are there any business incentives or underlying motives for spending so much time and money to purposely incarcerate adults? Should budget cut protesters be focusing more on the underlying causes of these cuts such as the prison system you mentioned?
ReplyDeleteThis really makes me think of the "Prison Pipeline", and all the facts you presented really give me a full understanding of how these things make sense. Also Jinx, a lot of it has to do with the fact that if you're in jail you can be made to forced labor. It's the only legal slavery we have left, and it's the legal way to make people lose many rights.So, why not put a bunch of money into a ton of free labor? Why not make laws that make is easier for certain *cough minority* cough groups to be incarcerated? Understanding just how much money we really put into the jail system really cements my understanding of that whole system. That's for the data Darnell
ReplyDeleteThe prison industry is hugely profitable with a steady stream of reliable customers courtesy of the war on drugs. The corrections lobby is extremely powerful.
ReplyDeleteAnother good batch of research that would work well for senior project.