We often hear of the school-to-prison
pipeline, where kids exit our public education system poorly educated and
without a diploma or skills, leaving them vulnerable to unemployment and a
future life of crime. While this is clearly a bombastic overstatement, it is
true that prisoners tend to be less literate and educated than society at
large. Indeed, some estimates indicate that as many as 66% of California’s inmates are reading below
a 9th-grade reading level, more than 50% below a 7th-grade
level, and 21% below a 3rd-grade level, suggesting that there is a link between
education and incarceration. However, the majority of inmates are also poor and,
since there is also a link between wealth and educational success, it is likely
that poverty is the cause of both their incarceration and illiteracy.
Even if poverty is ignored, there is
another significant connection between education and incarceration: the large
transfer of public resources over the past several decades from public K-12 and
higher education to support the growing prison system. This has not only
reduced the ability of schools to provide a decent education to all of their
students, but it has also stripped away many of the extra resources necessary
to support their lowest income students. Furthermore, with the defunding of the
state’s prestigious UC and CSU university systems, and the concomitant
skyrocketing cost of tuition, it is becoming harder and harder to afford a
university education, even for those students who are reading at grade level. Since
2007, tuition at UC and CSU has more than doubled, while community college
students have seen their fees increase 80%.
Lack of a college education decreases
people’s earning power and their ability to obtain a job in the first place.
This does not necessarily lead to criminal behavior or incarceration, but it
does contribute to the growing wealth gap and to the overall decline living
standards. The defunding of the universities has also made it nearly impossible
for young professors to obtain tenure or to earn sufficient wages to support
themselves in the expensive cities where most of the universities exist,
forcing some to abandon California for other regions or to leave teaching
altogether.
The problem is not purely one of
insufficient tax revenues, though this is certainly a big part of it. The state
also has a problem with irresponsible spending that panders to the powerful
Correctional Officers union, at the expense of the general public. Consider
that California spent 13% less on higher education in 2011 than it did in 1980,
after adjusting for inflation, while prison funding increased by 436% in that
same time period according to California Common Sense (CACS), a non-partisan policy organization.
The CACS report, called “Winners and Losers: Corrections and Higher
Education in California,” says that
the state now covers only 25% of the costs of its universities, compared to 1980,
when it paid for 66% of the costs of higher education.
Even with a massive prison construction program, the state still could
not keep up with the rapid influx of inmates, resulting in prisons that were operating
at up to twice their capacities. The state is now under federal mandate to reduce its prison
population to a mere 137% of capacity within 2 years.
Gov. Brown has addressed the problem by releasing state prisoners into county
jails, further stressing county infrastructures and budgets. In reality, the
state has thousands of people incarcerated who have committed only minor
nonviolent infractions and these prisoners could be released into the general
public with virtually no risk to public safety, thus saving the state millions
of dollars.
At the same time that California has been expanding its prison
system, hiring more guards, and increasing their pay, it has been slashing
programs and services for its college students. Over the past thirty years, the
ratio of staff (including faculty) to students has declined. In 1980, there was
one faculty member per 16 students at UC, and one faculty per 21 students at
CSU. By 2010, the ratio was one faculty per 21 students at UC, and one faculty
per 32 students at CSU. At the same time, middle management
at UC has been growing dramatically, now comprising 20% of
its budget.
In contrast to the situation at the state’s universities, the
number of prison guards per adult inmate has been growing and is now roughly
what it was in 1980, despite the large increase in prisoners. Services for
prisoners, however, have not kept up. This means that there are fewer
counselors, doctors, teachers and other support staff per prisoner, thus
reducing the quality of health care, education and general safety of prisoners,
as well as the chances that prisoners will be ready for life on the outside
when they are released. Furthermore, the ratio of parole staff to parolees is
at an all-time low (roughly 1.6 staff per 100 parolees), increasing the odds
that a convict will end up back in prison. (California has a recidivism rate of
60%).
While being a college professor is generally considered more
prestigious and higher status than being a prison guard, their salaries do not
reflect this. In 1980, the average guard salary in California was $25,858 a
year, while the average CSU faculty salary was about $29,015 annually. By 2006
the average guard salary had reached $94,518 annually, while the average CSU
faculty salary was a mere $70,615. After adjusting for inflation, the average
faculty salary in 2010 was less than it was in 1980.
In short, college professors, like most other members of the
middle and lower classes, have seen their wages and living standards stagnate
over the past thirty years. What is unique, but not surprising, is that prison
guards have seen their wages increase over this same period, making them one of
the only groups of wage earners to experience improvements in living standards
over the past 3 decades.
From the perspective of the employing class, schools are still
churning out sufficiently trained workers to keep most businesses in operation,
despite the decrease in wages for educators and the overall funding cuts. In
the areas where they are failing to do so (e.g., technology and science) they
can always import workers from abroad, often at lower wages than they would
have to pay native-born employees. Thus, slashing education budgets has not
hampered their ability to make huge profits. On the contrary, the wealth gap
continues to grow and California continues to gain new billionaires (currently
there are more than 80 billionaires and over 600,000 millionaires in the
state).
The increase in prisoners and prisons is an expense the wealthy
can largely defer to the rest of us through a taxation system that allows them to
pay an effective tax rate far lower than that paid by most middle-income wage
earners. At the same time, many goods and services can be produced by prisoners
at a cost that is competitive with the cheapest foreign labor since prisoners can
be compelled to work for virtually free (the minimum wage law does not apply to
prisoners).
Ultimately, the transfer of resources from higher education to
incarceration is just another tool for increasing the portion of the wealth
controlled by the richest members of society. Prison guards are generously
rewarded for their support of this system, while poor people, who make up the
majority of the prison population, pay for it with their very freedom. Professors
and students pay for it with declining living standards and growing debt, and
all working people pay for it in reduced services and public works.
