Public Schools and Private Prisons
Posted on | June 21, 2011 | No Comments
I stumbled across a post today which pointed out that Pennsylvania is trying to cut $1B from schools while spending $600M on building prisons. This is class warfare at its finest. All across the land states are chopping Billions of dollars from their education budgets. I don’t know what the total is, but a short web search shows that in addition to the end of the $80B of K-12 education focused stimulus (spread over 2 years) there is at least another $3-5B (more probably $10-15B I suspect) of cuts being made at the state level. Here is a good link to some of the cuts being made by 46 states. Think about that for a while… We are going to cut about $50B from public schools in one brutal summer. Those cuts will be spread between teachers, administrators, facilities, support staff, etc but at the end of the day, the all recombine to be taken directly out of our children’s hides. According to the NEA, in 2008 there were about 3.2 million teachers making an average of $54K per year. So if we take the entire cut in teachers, we will fire about 30% of the K-12 public school teachers in America this summer. I haven’t heard any national leader say word one about this. I guess they all send their kids to private schools and like the thought of raising a generation of uneducated cheap labor.
Now look at prisons. As of 2008 7.7% of the prison population in the US was in private prisons and the percentage is growing as virtually the only type of prison built in the last 5 years is private prisons. There have been a number of recent studies that suggest that private prisons cost just as much per prisoner and provide less safe and effective imprisonment so we are not getting any benefit from these prisons. But lets examine the favorite subject of our oppressor class, the profit motive. How does a private prison increase profit? One, they charge us more per prisoner. So unless we are very careful and regulate the heck out of them, they will simply increase the price on us. Two, they reduce expenditures per prisoner. This is why the studies are showing that private prisons don’t have any better outcome in terms of prisoner safety, recidivism rates, etc. than public ones. And finally, they increase the prisoner count. Why do you suppose the US leads the world in percentage of population behind bars? I contend that a big driver for this is the private prison industry. By definition, they are “The Man” and they are tapped into all the other power brokers. Their profit motive aligns perfectly with the desire of the Oligarchists to keep us afraid and docile. If you are poor and you commit even a tiny crime (using nacho cheese incorrectly for instance) you go to jail. If you are rich, you can literally get away with murder.
It just fits together nicely that we can spend less money on education thus making it more likely that our children will become criminals while we spend more money privatizing prisons so our tax dollars can add to the profits of rich people.
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