The states that spend more money on prisoners than college students

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

Sad to say my state, Washington, is one of them.

Since 1990, state and local spending on prisons and jails has risen more than three times faster than spending on schools, according to a new Department of Education report released Thursday.

Driving that disparity is the unprecedented rise in the incarcerated population over that time period, due in large part to the drug war and mandatory minimum sentencing policies designed to lock people up for long periods of time. The United States is now home to less than 5 percent of the world's population but nearly 25 percent of the world's imprisoned people.

The Department of Education report traces how that shift has impacted state and local budgets. Prison spending is still a fraction of overall pre-K through 12 education spending: States spend $71 billion on prisons and $534 billion on schools each year. But that combined state and local prison budget is now over an eighth the size of the school budget. Back in 1990, prison spending was a sixteenth the size of education spending.

"Budgets reflect our values, and the trends revealed in this analysis are a reflection of our nation’s priorities that should be revisited," said Education Secretary John B. King Jr. in a press release accompanying the report. "We need to invest more in prevention than in punishment, to invest more in schools, not prisons."


https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/07/07/the-states-that-spend-more-money-on-prisoners-than-college-students/?wpisrc=nl_rainbow&wpmm=1

[radical noodle]

1. The states surprise me

But some of that might relate to the conditions of their prisons. I thought I'd see Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia in this group, but maybe their prisons are such hell holes that they still spend more on education.