THE PRISON PROBLEM

If you're anything like me and have spent your whole life in the
great state of California, you've probably come to realize that
personal space is at a premium. A state population of over 36
million people practically guarantees that everything from our
freeways to our universities is drastically overcrowded. Perhaps
the best, and most frightening example of this
obscene overpopulation is evident in the California State Prison
system, which embraces a long history of overcrowding and over-funding.

In 2007, the state prison system was estimated to hold somewhere
around 170,000 inmates, close to 70 percent higher than the system's
maximum capacity of 100,000. Some facilities, such as Centennial
State Prison, are filled to over 200 percent of their maximum
capacity, creating an extremely hostile and dangerous environment
for guards and inmates alike. Numbers such as these seem even more
ridiculous when you consider that over 20,000 of these inmates are
serving sentences for nonviolent, drug-related crimes, and that the
vast majority of such sentences came as a result of simply
possessing illicit drugs, not from manufacturing or selling them.
However, in recent years, the state government's policy seems to
consist of simply ignoring such absurd statistics and throwing
billions of tax dollars at the problem, rather than examining why
such a huge portion of the population remains incarcerated.

By now, some of you are probably reading this and wondering how
prison overpopulation could possibly have a negative impact on your
life. Most of you probably don't plan on going to prison any time
soon, and therefore assume that you'll never see any of the adverse
effects that this problem could cause. However, the truth of matter
is that we, as students at a public university, are quite possibly
the people who are most affected by this problem. Recently, the San
Francisco Chronicle reported that $10 billion of the state's
2007-2008 budget was being allocated to the operation of the
corrections system, and $12 billion being allocated toward higher
education. The same article suggests that, if budget trends
continue, correctional spending would overtake higher education in
the next five years. While these statistics alone should be enough
to call into question the value our state puts on education, the
situation becomes even worse when one considers that the $10 billion
doesn't include the expenses of constructing new facilities, which
will cost the state another $7 billion. With the use of a little
arithmetic, one can see that the state plans to spend $5 billion
more on its prisons than it does its schools.

According to these numbers, one could claim that California cares
more about maintaining the largest prison population in the country
than it does about educating its young adult population. Perhaps no
one in the state government has stopped to think that providing an
education to the young people of California would result in less
people turning to a life of crime, and therefore serve to reduce the
number of people going to prison.

Whatever the case may be, it's clear that California has its
priorities and values all mixed up, and that the already debt-ridden
college students will be the ones who end up paying the price.

JAMES NOONAN is tired of having his education marginalized by the
state government. All those who feel the same way are welcome to
contact him at jjnoonan@ucdavis.edu.