Hey guys, Darnellios reporting again. Accept my apologies for the delay in this post. I have returned and shall continue where I left off on the topic of education funding v. prison funding. Now I took a look at some of the comments on my previous post, and I took a particular interest in Jinx's questions that he posed to me. So I will be happy to answer these questions to my fullest knowledge, and with no further ado, let me begin with the first:
"Is there any reason that so much money is being funneled into the prison systems instead of elsewhere?"
Yes indeed there is a reason, and the answer is quite simple here: The increase in prison population and incarcerated citizens. To review, the US possesses the largest prison population in the world at 2.3 million. In addition to that, about 5 million US citizens are on parole or probation. That totals up to approximately 7.3 million people within the US justice system. Turning to another country population reference, that 7.3 million rivals that of Bulgaria's population, with a difference of only a mere 55,000. With a correction population that high, you can bet your bottom dollar that it will cost a pretty penny to maintain it all. From quartering to providing food to security measures and other expenses, the corrections system is costly.
A prime example would be the state of California, which is currently experiencing a prison overpopulation crisis, and are currently trying to shrink the size of their prison population. Though California has managed to decrease the occupational capacity to about 140 percent, they exceed state target capacity of 137.5 percent. In an attempt to remedy this, prisoners are being sent out of state, while others are being shipped to private prisons. Still more are being placed in county jails for low-level offenses. While this attributed to California's slight decrease in prison population, their jail populations are now increasing; thus they are now back to square one.
Furthermore, when the funding for prison systems comes from the same pool as education, health care, housing, and public assistance, money can and most certainly will be drained from that fund for correction costs. Although the funding going toward the other aspects of the budget is still larger- specifically for education- than the corrections fund, the billions of dollars spent on corrections is still increasing while the other funds are decreasing, leading to a lack of funds remaining for all else. In conclusion, more citizens incarcerated means more money towards corrections, and more money towards corrections means less money towards curriculum.
Hopefully I helped you gain a better understanding of this topic Jinx. I will end this post here and answer the remaining questions on newer posts as soon as I can, preferably this week. The next inquiry I shall touch on is such regarding business incentives and underlying motives.
For now, this is D. Politopolous on recess.
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