STATE'S FUTURE WITH EDUCATION NOT WITH PRISONS

Private, for-profit prisons are sapping vital resources from education and
the future of our children.

For-profit corporations have convinced many states, including Mississippi,
that they can run prisons cheaper and more effectively than the state's
penal system. A growing body of data has emerged to show that this is not
the case.

Like other parts of the country, Mississippi has placed several for-profit
prisons in depressed communities with the promise of jobs. The communities
remain depressed. A limited number from the community, as well as outside
the community, fill the fixed number of positions needed to run the prison.

Education Costs Less

However, the communities are affected, and people are beginning to see the
connection. Our public schools are a wreck. Some districts, often in these
same deprived communities, are barely able to stay afloat as money needed
for education is funneled into prisons.

It costs much more to incarcerate a person than to educate a person. In
Virginia and Mississippi, for instance, a college education is $4,000
cheaper than the cost of incarceration.

A significant portion of our state's budget goes to corrections even though
violent crime in Mississippi has dropped to the lowest rate in years.
Instead, we are filling a system that profits off non-violent offenders
taking up space.

Grass-roots Leadership, a coalition of activists in several Southern
states, issued a report last spring, during a news conference on the
Capitol steps, entitled, "Education versus Incarceration, a Mississippi
Case Study." This study clearly spells out that education and prevention
programs are cheaper than incarceration and keep more people productive and
out of prison.

Mississippi is facing a huge economic downturn. The governor has closed one
for-profit prison, Delta State Correctional Facility in Greenwood, owned by
Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), and has renegotiated contracts
with other prison facility providers.

School Budgets Imperiled

The writing is on the wall. We can no longer afford to see our school
districts collapse as money is diverted to fill beds to meet contractual
requirements for providers of for-profit prisons. This became apparent when
it became known that taxpayers were paying for "ghost inmates" (empty beds
to meet contracts). At one point private prisons were to be fully funded,
while the state correctional system had its budget cut.

It is not only about money. Our future is at stake. Our punitive criminal
justice system is supplying a steady flow of inmates to fill prisons. By
commissioning studies to track children's lack of progress at the
third-grade level in order to plan the number of cells needed in the
future, we are playing a draconian game that turns the list of core
American values on its head.

Public education is the bedrock of American democracy, as Thomas Jefferson
so clearly described. To have a semi-literate mass feeding prisons, unable
to exercise their right to vote when they get out, is a danger to our way
of life.

It is cheaper to educate well, and to provide adequate public schools in
every community in our nation and our state. It takes will and
determination for those who set policy and priorities. Even with the
current financial situation in Mississippi, we can and we must make public
education the best it can be for every child in every community in
Mississippi. Our future hangs in the balance.

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The Rev. Jeremy Tobin is associate pastor of Christ the King Church in
Jackson and a contributing writer to the Mississippi Forum, a nopartisan
educational organization. To contact: Mississippi Forum, P.O. Box 3515,
Jackson, MS 39207-3515.