SPEND MORE MONEY ON EDUCATION, NOT PRISONS

A disturbing report was released this week showing that since the 1980s, as
funding for prisons has mushroomed, funding for higher education has gone
begging. As states face greater fiscal constraints in the upcoming budget
cycle, higher education could come out on the losing end of yet another
fiscal battle with our nation's prisons.

The report, by the Justice Policy Institute, found that during the 1980s
and 1990s state spending on corrections grew at six times the rate of state
spending on higher education. Between 1980 and 2000, corrections' share of
state and local spending grew by 104 percent while higher education's share
of state and local spending declined by 21 percent.

This change in state priorities was by no means equally distributed, with
black men and the poor bearing most of the burden. Between 1980 and 2000,
about three times as many African-American men were added to the prison
system as were added to the nation's colleges and universities. By
1999-2000, there were nearly a third more African-American men in prison
and jail (791,600) than were enrolled in higher education (603,000).

From 1980 to 1998, student tuition and fee support for higher education
rose at eight times the rate of state support. For a low-income family, the
cost of paying the tuition at a four-year public institution increased from
13 percent of median family income in 1980 to 25 percent in 2000.

As alarming as these national figures are, state-by-state changes are even
more disturbing. In California and New York, states with two of the
nation's most vaunted public university systems, general-fund spending on
prisons grew by $3 billion and $1.4 billion, respectively, while general
fund expenditures for college dropped by $1 billion and $850 million,
respectively, between 1985 and 2000. In Ohio, 38 times as many
African-American men were added to the prison system since 1980 as to
colleges and universities.

But it doesn't have to be this way. Several factors make prison populations
and their attendant budgets particularly ripe for cutting in this year of
fiscal restraint.

For one thing, the expansion of America's prisons has been largely driven
by an increase in nonviolent and drug prisoners over the past 20 years,
making it easier to modify it with sensible policy reforms. Indeed, during
the last two decades, the percentage of state prisoners incarcerated for
violent offenses has actually declined from 57 percent to 48 percent. From
1980 to 1997, the number of violent offenders going to prison doubled, the
number of nonviolent offenders tripled, and the number of drug offenders
increased eleven-fold. At the end of 2001, there were an estimated 1.2
million nonviolent offenders locked up in America at a cost of more than
$24 billion annually.

Public opinion increasingly favors using community punishment options
instead of prison for nonviolent offenders. Separate polls published within
the last year by Parade Magazine, ABC News and Peter Hart and Associates
show two-thirds of the public supports supervision, treatment and community
service in lieu of imprisonment for nonviolent offenders. A Field Poll
taken in California in December found that four times as many respondents
supported cutting the prison budget as supported cutting the higher
education budget. Nearly two-thirds of voters in California and Arizona
approved initiatives to divert nonviolent drug offenders from prison to
treatment. Voters in Michigan, Ohio and Washington, D.C., decide on similar
initiatives this November.

In some very conservative states, elected officials are responding to dire
fiscal realities and the shift in public opinion with policies that hold
offenders accountable outside prisons walls, without jeopardizing public
safety. Republican governors in Michigan, Illinois, Ohio and Florida have
all closed prisons as cost-saving measures. Texas, the state with the
largest prison system in the country, has modified its parole practices,
increasing parole release and creating alternative sanctions instead of
returning parolees to prison for minor violations. Texas cut the number of
returning parolees by 26 percent and reduced its prison population by
nearly 8,000 inmates.

Although New York has been unable to modify its harsh Rockefeller drug
laws, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Kansas and Iowa have all either
returned sentencing discretion to judges, increased parole release and/or
created alternative sanctions for parole violators.

Cutting higher education to fund corrections is a foolish, self-fulfilling
act. As our young people return to school this year, we should recommit to
higher education by diverting nonviolent offenders into treatment options
and sensibly reining in prison costs.