PRISONS: STATE SHOULD REVIEW ITS POLICIES

The figures sometimes differ, but the message is often the same:
Mississippi should be placing its bet on education rather than unduly
expensive prison operations.

When the legislature cut the Mississippi Department of Education budget
last February, the department turned around and cut $402,000 from the
Cleveland District's funds.

The cut prompted Cleveland School District Superintendent Reggie Barnes to
comment with some justification that he doesn't think the legislature
"gives a damn" about our education system.

Barnes said the money the legislature spends to house one prisoner is
$17,000, and the amount given to educate a student in one of the state's
school districts is anywhere from $3,000 to $4,000, "Give us half the money
that you use to put them in prison and let us educate them, and I guarantee
we will cut the number in half," he commented.

Monday, a nonprofit group's review of Mississippi spending on corrections
came to a similar conclusion, noting that money now going to finance
private prisons such as the Delta Correctional Facility in Greenwood and
the Wilkinson County facility in Woodville, could be better spent on more
effective rehabilitation programs.

Changing spending priorities "will free up taxpayer dollars for education
and prevention programs that have been shown to deter individuals from
committing criminal acts," said a report titled, "Education v.
Incarceration: A Mississippi Case Study.

The report, produced by Grassroots Leadership of Charlotte, N.C., said that
Mississippi spends $10,672 to incarcerate a person, but it spends only
$6,871 to send someone to college.

In fairness to the legislature, it did make an effort to reduce the state's
growing prison population by modifying a law recently requiring inmates to
serve 85 percent of their jail time. It permitted nonviolent offenders to
be eligible for early parole after serving at least a fourth of their
sentences.

That's one of the reasons why in responding to the latest criticism House
Penitentiary Committee Chairman Bennett Malone, D-Carthage, commented, "I
really get frustrated with this type stuff."

We can understand him trying to defend his committee's actions, but rather
than getting frustrated with the criticism, we would much rather see him
spending his time reviewing prison policy and looking for innovative ways
to prevent recidivism and thus cut costs.

There are two major points our legislators should always bear in mind as
they go about their jobs of building a better Mississippi.

First, the state will always be poor until it dramatically improves its
educational system, which has thus left a fourth of our adults either
illiterate or functionally illiterate. That lack of education feeds not
only the prison rolls, but the rolls of our social service programs.
Somewhere down the dead-end road of ignorance and poverty, Mississippi is
going to have to build a bridge to success by making good education for all
our citizens our top priority.

Second, legislators are going to have to at least stop wasting money on
silly, feel-good, "tough-on-crime" items such as requiring prisoners to
wear stripped uniforms. When it did that a few years ago, Mississippi
taxpayers had to fork over around $1 million.

That much money could have bought a lot of textbooks and a lot of supplies
that many of our state's children are having to do without this year.