Invest in Education, Not Incarceration

By Judge Greg Mathis

Last year, more than 7 million American people - that’s about one in every 32 adults - were behind bars or on probation or parole. The United States has, for years, imprisoned more people than any other country in the world. Yet, we don’t have the highest literacy rate. And our economy continues to take a hit as jobs are outsourced to foreign countries with a cheaper and better educated workforce. Inner-city schools fail half of their students and jobs are removed from communities, replaced with guns and drugs, resulting in incarceration, if you’re lucky, death if you’re not.

Nonetheless, many U.S. states have cut their education budgets to compensate for rapid growth in prison populations and prison construction. The misguided priorities that inform such decisions have only served to further marginalize already oppressed populations. It’s time that this country shifts its focus away from imprisonment and commits its resources to education and empowerment.
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In the past 20 years, more than a thousand new prisons and jails have been built in the U.S. Yet, our prisons are more overcrowded now than ever. According to the United State Justice Department, the total number of inmates increased 35-percent from 1995 to 2005. The nation’s ‘war on drugs’ and the stiff sentencing laws that grew out of that war are largely to blame. Nonviolent possession offenses, a crime that, in another country, would more than likely not result in a prison sentence, make up a large percentage of the prison population.

The numbers of individuals sentenced for drug crimes increased nearly 65-percent between 1996 and 2003, accounting for the largest increase in inmates in the federal system Black and Hispanic men only make up 10-percent of this country’s population, yet they make up 60-percent of nation’s prison population. Men aren’t the only casualties here. Black women are three times more likely than whites to end up in prison and women of color are increasingly being sentenced to long prison terms for nonviolent drug offenses.

If federal and local governments were to adequately fund the nation’s public schools, ensuring all students had access to high-quality teachers, tutoring and after-school programs, we could stem the growth of the nation’s prison population. With support, many could be steered away from drugs and the street life and pushed towards college or vocational school. Instead, the country has poured its money into a criminal injustice system that, instead of creating special programs designed to rehabilitate the low-level offender, corals these lost souls into the nation’s prisons. Upon release, having no education and no skills, many return to the lifestyles that landed them in prison. It’s a dangerous cycle and only prison architects and big business benefits.

In 1977, I was incarcerated for 7 months. I was told that it cost taxpayers $30,000 to incarcerate me. A year later, I enrolled at Eastern Michigan University under an affirmative action program. Because I was poor, I had to use loans and tax-payer supported government grants to pay for my education. The cost of my four year education was $24,000, less than the cost of my short jail sentence. No longer a burden to taxpayers, I am a significant taxpayer, helping, through my tax contributions, to pave the way for others who’ve yet to get an opportunity to make a way for themselves. The tax dollars used to support my education were a worthy investment, one that benefits all of society. America should take note and act accordingly

Judge Greg Mathis is national vice president of Rainbow PUSH and a national board member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
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