From my perspective, we’ve lost touch with the impact that mass-incarceration has had on everyone — including you and me.
For example, in the 1970s, California schools ranked at the top of the world in both student success and per pupil funding. Along came the tough on crime politicians who promised they would save us from the “criminal element. As the tough on crime fever spread, tax dollars once allocated to our children’s schools, were transferred into prison budgets.
Today, the tables have been flipped.
California schools now rank at the bottom (#41) of the nation (spending about $10,291 per K-12 student or about $1,900 less than the $12,252 per student spent by the nation as a whole.)
California now spends over $75,560 per inmate.
California public school teachers earn around $45,000. while prison guards earn $71,000. Prison guards need only a GED — not even a high school diploma.
Teachers must wait until 65 to retire, while prison guards and police officers retire at 55 with a pension that provides 90% of their working pay for the rest of their lives. With a large percentage of teachers and prison guards married to someone in “the business” public pension costs are insanely out of control.
For decades, politicians marketed prisons to rural America. As a result, prisons were built in rural communities — out of sight, out of mind of cities. The population inside a prison, like the one in my community, is larger than the town where they are placed — forcing small farmers to compete with prisons for water. Worse yet, these communities rely on groundwater. For decades,5,500 hundred prisoners and another 5,000 staff members were using the toilet several times a day, without a sewer system. Guess what happened?
In my mind, transferring tax dollars out of schools and into prisons was a mistake. Now that America has put more than 2-million people in prison, are you happier, safer and richer? Are you happy paying the CEO’s of private prison companies 10 times more than wardens once employed by the state?
Next time you ask what’s wrong with rural America, remember this: prisons are not “economic-development”.
