Investing More in Prisons: The states that spend more money on incarceration than college students

Wash Post

Since 1990, state and local spending on prisons and jails has risen more than three times faster than spending on schools, according to a new Department of Education report released Thursday.

Driving that disparity is the unprecedented rise in the incarcerated population over that time period, due in large part to the drug war and mandatory minimum sentencing policies designed to lock people up for long periods of time. The United States is now home to less than 5 percent of the world's population but nearly 25 percent of the world's imprisoned people.

The Department of Education report traces how that shift has impacted state and local budgets. Prison spending is still a fraction of overall pre-K through 12 education spending: States spend $71 billion on prisons and $534 billion on schools each year. But that combined state and local prison budget is now over an eighth the size of the school budget. Back in 1990, prison spending was a sixteenth the size of education spending.

"Budgets reflect our values, and the trends revealed in this analysis are a reflection of our nation’s priorities that should be revisited," said Education Secretary John B. King Jr. in a press release accompanying the report. "We need to invest more in prevention than in punishment, to invest more in schools, not prisons."

While prison spending has risen three times as quickly as school spending nationally, in some states the disparities are far greater. In Colorado, prison spending rose five times faster than school spending. Prison spending grew six times more quickly in South Dakota and seven times in Wyoming. In Texas, where the disparity is greatest, prison spending grew at nearly eight times the rate as school spending.

The disparities between prisons and higher education spending are even starker. State spending on colleges and universities has remained roughly flat, in inflation-adjusted dollars, since 1990. But spending on prisons has nearly doubled. There are now 18 states where taxpayers spend more on jails and prisons than they do on colleges and universities. [MORE]