REPORT: PRISON COSTS HURTING EDUCATION

West Virginia taxpayers pay about $6,500 each year for every full-time
college student in the state. But taxpayers must pay almost $20,000 a
year for each person incarcerated by the Division of
Corrections.

As a new report explains, expenses for Corrections are eating away at
the rest of the state's budget and at the expense of education.

The West Virginia Council of Churches, in partnership with a national
organization called Grassroots Leadership and the Washington, D.C.-based
Justice Policy Institute, have produced a report titled, "Protecting the
Future: Moderating West Virginia's Budget Crisis."

Father Brian O'Donnell of Wheeling Jesuit University is a co-author of
the report, and he will be at a forum at 7 p.m. Monday to discuss the
report's findings.

The forum is open to the public and will be at St. John's Episcopal
Church Parish House at Quarrier Street and Leon Sullivan Way in Charleston.

The report explains that in the last 10 years West Virginia's prison
population has more than doubled, but the state's population in
general and the crime rate stayed about the same.

"In 2001, West Virginia had the highest incarceration growth rate in
the entire United States - 9.3 percent," the report states.

The funding to keep up with the high incarceration rate is coming at
the expense of social service programs and education, the report concludes.

"The state has increased spending on prisons five times faster than it
has on higher education," the report states. "From 1992 to 2002, state
appropriations for higher education went up 23 percent in
inflation-adjusted dollars, while state appropriations for the
Division of Corrections went up almost 140 percent. By contrast, the
DOC appropriations between 1981 and 1992 remained basically stable."

Although West Virginia has a low crime rate, its prison population
doubled between the years 1992 and 2002, the report states.

The writers of the report understand that people must be protected
from violent behavior, but they advocate a variety of steps to stem
the rise in prison population. Some of those steps include: full
funding for the Day Reporting Center initiative that would reduce the
numbers of nonviolent offenders who need to be jailed and granting
more parole.

The report also advocates spending money for "the types of programs
that truly make a difference: to education, counseling, job creation,
and increased parole supervision. With the money spent on
rehabilitation rather than on prison construction, West Virginia's
already low crime rate could drop even further."

The report writers also want to see early childhood programs fully
funded.

The approaches they advocate are "not just desirable, but practical,"
they wrote.