California's mixed up priorities -- education vs. prisons
08/05/2010
For most California residents, it comes as no big surprise that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a fiscal emergency for the state last week. Over the last several years, it seems to be a recurring situation for California — dire financial straits and legislators squandering precious time, bickering over tax cuts, welfare and other public programs. Given the state’s list of priorities, it’s a predictably disappointing state of affairs.
At first glance at the governor’s proposed revised budget released in May, it would seem everything is in order — $35.9 billion for K-12, $12.9 billion for higher education and $9 billion for corrections and rehabilitation. What isn’t fully realized by the average person, though, without deeper investigation, is how much taxpayers are actually spending on each individual student versus each individual inmate.
Based on the student and inmate populations, if the governor’s budget (or one that is similar) is passed, taxpayers will spend $5,790 per student in K-12, $5,375 per student in higher education (nevertheless the fact college students are saddled with tens of thousands of dollars of debt before they even enter the workforce) and, tipping the scales, a whopping $60,000 per inmate. Correction and rehabilitation takes the cake.
Unfortunately, this egregious spending on warehousing criminals and those who protect us from them is happening right here in our own backyards. Ventura County passed a budget, allocating roughly a quarter of its $1.64 billion total to public protection. Area cities have similar issues, dedicating large proportions of their budgets to law enforcement and similar old-school measures to address crime.
In our news story this week, Moorpark cracks down on taggers (p. 8), it is painfully obvious that this shell game of figuring which solution works best — fines and/or jail time — isn’t working. For those who have had their property violated by taggers, the easiest solution is prosecution. (The easiest solution for any crime, for that matter, is prosecution.) But locking them up and throwing away the key until they get out a year later with a criminal record and a slim chance of becoming a respectable member of society isn’t a responsible solution. As one local resident put it, “What are you going to do? Cut off the guy’s thumbs?” Neither jail time nor heavy fines guarantee that a person won’t return to the same life, committing the same crimes, or worse.
In the city of Moorpark, no alternative programs for those who have been found guilty of committing such crimes exist currently. While the nonprofit Arts for Action in Oxnard has been able to work with convicted taggers and the like, providing them city-approved alternative canvases as creative outlets while they give back in the form of community service, rather than having them pay heavy fines and serve jail time, it is just a drop in the bucket of progressive solutions. The key to crime abatement isn’t in prosecution or alternative programs, but in prevention. And prevention begins and ends with education.
If the state, the county and/or our local cities spent half on education just of what is being spent now on law enforcement and prisons, our crime rate would be reduced substantially, and countless studies have proven it. We understand that we are far from making such a huge paradigm shift right now, in the midst of a fiscal crisis.
But it took the real estate market to crumble, the stock market to crash and the BP oil leak devastating the Gulf of Mexico for our government to demand tougher regulations to prevent such disasters in the future. Let’s hope it doesn’t take a similar catastrophe to overhaul our education and criminal systems.
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