Priorities Gone Wrong: Prison Spending Skyrockets, Leaves School Spending Behind

The U.S. Department of Education just released a report, State and Local Expenditures on Corrections and Education, that reinforces what is known about the alarming explosion in the rate of incarceration in the United States.

The Education Department’s report is about budgets—across states and localities: “From 1979-80 to 2012-13, public PK (PreK)-12 expenditures increased by 107 percent (from $258 to $534 billion), while total state and local corrections expenditures increased by 324 percent (from $17-$71 billion)—triple the rate of increase in education spending…  All states had lower expenditure growth rates for PK-12 education than for corrections, and in the majority of the states, the rate of increase for corrections was more than 100 percentage points higher than the rate for education… In 24 states, the growth rate in per capita corrections spending was more than 100 percentage points higher than the rate for per-pupil PK-12 education spending.”  Finally, “At the postsecondary level, the contrast was even starker: from 1989-90 to 2012-13, state and local spending on corrections rose by 89 percent while state and local appropriations for higher education remained flat.”

The new report confirms the trend in K-12 education spending reported last winter by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities: “At least 31 states provided less state funding per student in the 2014 school year (that is, the school year ending in 2014) than in the 2008 school year, before the recession took hold.  In at least 15 states, the cuts exceeded 10 percent.”  State governments are spending less on public education than they used to.  Most of the increases in education spending in the past few decades have been for special services mandated under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

The new report from the Department of Education further confirms the reality of the exploding rate of incarceration over recent decades: “(T)he number of people incarcerated in state and local correctional facilities more than quadrupled over the past few decades, rising from about 490,000 in 1980 to over 2 million in 2014, due in part to the enactment of additional, often lengthy mandatory minimum sentence laws. Incarceration rates have increased despite large decreases in crime rates, which declined by more than 50 percent between 1980 and 2014… (T)he U.S. has the largest incarcerated population in the world…”

Public education and racial justice advocates have been pressing school districts to address one factor that has contributed to growing incarceration of youths and young adults: school discipline policies that immediately involve the police rather than locating discipline procedures within the school.  Such policies have been shown to have contributed significantly to a “school-to-prison pipeline.”  Add to this the growth of suspension and expulsion that puts students with disciplinary infractions out of school and at greater risk of getting into deeper trouble.  Successful advocacy by civil rights groups has successfully pressured the U.S. Department of Education to insist that school districts avoid overly punitive discipline policies and institute “restorative” programs that support better behavior and conflict mediation.

But the rapid growth of incarceration has also impacted children and young people by undermining families, intensifying poverty, and tearing apart neighborhoods when parents are sent away to jails and prisons.  While the implications for children when parents are incarcerated has not been sufficiently covered in the press, sociologists have explored what the trend means for the children left behind.

In Our Kids: The American Dream In Crisis, Robert Putnam explains: “For both black children and white children, the risk of having a parent imprisoned by the time they reached 14 rose significantly between the birth cohort of 1978… and the birth cohort of 1990, and that risk was concentrated among children whose parents were less educated… This period of exploding incarceration is precisely the period in which single-parent families became more and more common in the less educated, lower-income stratum of the population.  Correlation does not prove causation, of course, but mass incarceration has certainly removed a very large number of young fathers from poor neighborhoods, and the effects of their absence, on white and nonwhite kids alike, are known to be traumatic, leaving long-lasting scars… Paternal incarceration (independent of other facts about a child’s background, like the parents’ education and income and race) is a strong predictor of bad educational outcomes, like getting poor grades and dropping out of school… Having a dad in prison is… one of the most common themes in the lives of poor kids.” (Our Kids, pp. 76-77)

Patrick Sharkey examines the effect of the explosive growth of incarceration: “Accompanying the nationwide ‘War on Drugs’ and the proliferation of ‘tough on crime’ political rhetoric was the emergence of sentencing commissions, the enactment of mandatory minimum sentences, and the scaling back or elimination of parole across the states… These changes have led to the emergence of the prison as a central institution in the black community…  When young men go to prison they are not only separated from their families; they are separated from the opportunity to obtain education, experience, or skills that are useful in the labor force. When they return, the obstacles they face as they attempt to reenter society are daunting. Returning prisoners often face overwhelming child support obligations that accumulate during their time in prison…. Without the realistic prospect of stable employment, it is extremely unlikely that these men can support a family…. The result is a segment of the community that is detached from the legal labor market and detached from the family unit.” (Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress toward Racial Equality, pp. 75-76)

Sharkey examines the challenges mass incarceration poses for the establishment and maintenance of families that can support children: “What does it mean for a community when almost one out of every ten of its children has a father who is incarcerated? We are only beginning to know the answer to this question but a set of recent studies has already demonstrated a strong association between parental incarceration and children’s mental health, aggressiveness, and subsequent involvement with the criminal justice system.” (Stuck in Place, pp. 77-78)

Sharkey’s focus is the convergence of a mass of structural injustices in the poorest neighborhoods of our nation’ cities: “These communities are the product of the economic transformation that has taken place in urban centers over the past several decades, in which the jobs that supported a growing black working class disappeared over time.  They are the result of the erratic federal commitment to America’s cities, reflected in major cuts to housing, to economic development, and to the welfare state at the same time that joblessness in urban enters was growing and the need for support becoming more acute.  Finally, these communities are the product of the punitive response to the widespread economic dislocation, in which increasingly harsh punishment has led to levels of imprisonment that are unmatched in the world and that are targeted toward the by-products of deindustrialization: young, less educated, minority men.  Perhaps more than any other policy, demographic trend, or economic change in the post civil rights era, the explosion in incarceration rates from the 1970s onward has the potential to create lasting damage to black communities that may extend on to the next generation.” (Stuck in Place, pp. 78-79)

Here is Robert Putnam’s summation of our society’s current challenge: “Any serious effort to deal with the family and community facets of the opportunity gap should include efforts to reduce incarceration for nonviolent crime and enhance rehabilitation.  Incarceration, especially paternal incarceration, was part of the story of virtually every poor kid we met in this study.” (Our Kids, p. 247)

Education Funding Equity: A Technocratic Justification vs. Jonathan Kozol’s Rationale

In a memorable keynote address fifteen years ago I heard Jonathan Kozol declare, “People say that spending money on education is just throwing money at the problem. We ought to try that. It might work.”

Certainly investing in public school equity and improvement has not been the trend in recent years.  About ten years ago, New York set up a new school funding formula to send more money to poorer school districts to remedy the lawsuit in Campaign for Fiscal Equity v. New York, but when the Great Recession hit, New York’s general assembly stopped funding the plan it had created.  At about the same time the legislature of Pennsylvania created a formula for the purpose of equalizing school funding, but in came Governor Tom Corbett who cut a billion dollars out of the state’s education budget, and the new formula died.  Kansas has radically cut taxes and slashed education funding accordingly; it is mired in a lawsuit to try to force the state to fund education.  And last Friday the state supreme court in Texas agreed to hear an appeal of what the Associated Press calls “the gargantuan school finance ruling” that found “the way the state pays for public schools is unconstitutional, saying funding levels are inadequate and are unfairly distributed around the state.”

For extremely sensible advice on public policy around budgets and expenditures, I recommend the reports from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which last October released a paper on climbing investment in prisons across the states and an accompanying drop in state allocations for public education.  “Even as states spend more on corrections, they are underinvesting in educating children and young adults, especially those in high-poverty neighborhoods.  At least 30 states are providing less general funding per student this year for K-12 schools than before the recession, after adjusting for inflation; in 14 states the reduction exceeds 10 percent.  Higher education cuts have been even deeper: the average state has cut higher education funding per student by 23 percent since the recession hit, after adjusting for inflation.  Eleven states spent more of their general funds on corrections than higher education in 2013.  And some of the states with the biggest education cuts in recent years also have among the nation’s highest incarceration rates. This is not sound policy.”

Noting that while crime has dropped overall, the share of offenders arrested who are subsequently sent to prison has dramatically risen at the same time the length of stay in prison for each offender has also risen, the report suggests, “If states were still spending the same amount on corrections as they did in the mid-1980s, adjusted for inflation, they would have about $28 billion more available each year for education and other productive investments.”

As for spending priorities for education, “Unfortunately, a number of states provide less funding for high-poverty schools than for low-poverty schools, while some others provide about the same funding to high-and low-poverty districts.  As of 2011, only 14 states provided at least 5 percent more funding per student for high-poverty districts than low-poverty districts. Further, many states provide inadequate funding for schools overall… None of the states with the ten highest incarceration rates ranked in the top half of states for school funding per student in 2011.”

Surely it would seem that in a compassionate and just society—a society whose citizens believe in equality, fairness, and the American Dream—these numbers would be an adequate motivator for reform.  But in case a commitment to the common good isn’t enough to motivate us these days, there is a new opinion piece by Noah Smith for Bloomberg View—a sort of plutocrats’ justification for public school spending, Throw More Money at Education.

Smith references a longitudinal economic paper, just published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, that justifies school funding by demonstrating a correlation with children’s future earnings.  The paper comes from economists C. Kirabo Jackson, Ricker Johnson and Claudia Persico. “The economists find that spending works.  Specifically, they find that a 10 percent increase in spending, on average, leads children to complete 0.27 more years of school, to make wages that are 7.25 percent higher, and to have a substantially reduced chance of falling into poverty.  These are long-term, durable results.  Conclusion: throwing money at the problem works.  Here’s the hitch: The authors find that the benefits of increased spending are much stronger for poor kids than for wealthier ones. So if you, like me, are in the upper portion of the U.S. income distribution, you may be reading this and thinking: ‘Why should I be paying more for some poor kid to be educated?’ After all, why should one person pay the cost while another reaps the benefits?”

To convince such a skeptic, Smith counts the ways increasing spending might be worth the investment: “When poor Americans become better workers, it doesn’t just boost their wages.  It also boosts the profitability of the companies where they work.”  “The more industries can use U.S. workers instead of Chinese workers, the more industries will base their production in the U.S.”  “If you own a business, you might need to hire some low-income people.”

Later in his piece, Smith adds some non-business benefits to his list.  “Having more educated poor people makes for a better civil society… It might also be nice not to have to live behind the isolating walls of a gated community. One way to reduce crime, of course, is to pay for more police and increase incarceration rates.  But another way is to improve education.” “At the risk of sounding grandiose, let me go even further: Education is really the difference between a cohesive society and a collection of people who happen to live next to each other.”

Ah… we learn that Noah Smith and Jonathan Kozol really agree, but Smith imagines that Kozol’s old-fashioned approach—preaching ethical public policy—is too dated for a technocratic, efficient America.

In case you are moved by the old fashioned way of presenting the case, here is what Jonathan Kozol writes: “In paying taxes for the sustenance of public schools, we’re not just buying something for ourselves. We’re buying something for the benefit of the community in which we live, and for the state and, ultimately, for the nation. In other words… with all the serious challenges they face and all of the inequities they bear… (public schools are) instruments of an intended decency—a decency that is, admittedly, not realized now in many sectors of the public system as it stands, but one that generations of Americans have ardently believed, and most believe today, to be worth striving for.” (2007, Letters to a Young Teacher, p. 147)