Apr 08 2011

U.S. Society Spending More on Prisons vrs. Education

(9 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

Anybody know of a state, or national mega, that has a lottery, playing mostly to the lower income citizen, dedicated to prison spending, me neither!

Think about that. Every school depends on the state lottery extra funding, including the suburban campuses right down to the old run down inner city schools, that’s suppose to go towards education funding, wink wink, while the citizens cut their share towards, all while the systematic destruction of public education goes on. Now even more blatant then previous with the attacks on teachers and funding while giving even more breaks to the wealthy and corporate now citizen. And yet the society is spending more to incarcerate then to educate even with those supposed extra funds.

Below is a report that aired last night as well as the recent released NAACP report.

AIR DATE: April 7, 2011

NAACP Report Says Shift in Funding Toward Prisons ‘Failing Us’


SUMMARY

A new report from the NAACP shows states are devoting increasingly larger portions of their budgets to prisons, while education gets smaller and smaller portions. Judy Woodruff discusses the report with NAACP President Benjamin Jealous and Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform. Transcript

Misplaced Priorities: A New Report From NAACP


On April 7th, the NAACP released a new report, Misplaced Priorities, that examines America’s escalating levels of prison spending and its impact on state budgets and our nation’s children.

Misplaced Priorities tracks the steady shift of state funds away from education and toward the criminal justice system. Researchers have found that over-incarceration most often impacts vulnerable and minority populations, and that it destabilizes communities.

The report is part of the NAACP’s “Smart and Safe Campaign,” and offers a set of recommendations that will help policymakers in all 50 states downsize prison populations and shift the savings to education budgets.

Below are profiles of the six cities studied in the report, as well as three profiled individuals. {continued}

NAACP: U.S. Society More on Incarceration vrs. Education

This society is collapsing from the bottom up and I think we’ve passed the line of return to what once was being built, with the wealth and power at the top, that too will eventually collapse on itself!

1 comment

  1. NAACP Report Says Shift in Funding Toward Prisons ‘Failing Us’

    BENJAMIN JEALOUS: … take it in two pieces.

    So, on the one hand, we know that, for instance, drug rehab, dollar for dollar, is seven times more effective for dealing with nonviolent drug addicts, which are the bulk of people in prison, than jail or prison. On the other hand, we also know that, if you look, for instance, at the state of California, when California was known to really have the best public universities in the entire world, like in the ’70s and ’80s, they were spending 3 percent of their state budget on prisons and 11 percent on their colleges and universities.

    Today, they’re not known to have the best in the world anymore. They spend 10-plus percent on prisons and 7 percent on colleges and universities. Let me say, Pennsylvania had a big budget battle a couple of years ago. They took several hundred million straight out of the ed budget and put it into a hole in the prison budget.

    And we know that when kids don’t the high-quality teachers and the resources that they need, they simply don’t perform as well.

    Odd how it sounded like breaking news on PBS. Wasn’t in the 70’s when Jesse Jackson said “It is cheaper to send a man to Yale than Jail.”

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