If, as the idiom goes, money indeed does talk, then state and local governments in the United States have a very important announcement: They care more about felons than schoolchildren.
That’s the alarming conclusion of a new report from the U.S. Department of Education, which shows that state and local government spending between 1979 and 2013 on incarcerating citizens has increased at three times the rate of expenditures on K-12 education for taxpayers—a 324 percent increase ($17 to $71 billion) for prisons and jails, compared to a 107 percent increase ($258 to $534 billion) for primary and secondary schools. More alarmingly, expenditures on jails and prisons rose 89 percent during that same time period while spending on post-secondary education like community colleges and public universities remained totally flat. Prison seems to be a better investment for states.
[For more of this story, written by Jared Keller, go to https://psmag.com/how-prisons-...e15944783#.usjl36s0j]
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