More Prisoners than Students

University of California President Mark Yudof recently wrote:

Fifty years ago a vision of opportunity was born in California. I'm talking about the creation of the Master Plan for Higher Education, the document that turned our state into a global model for accessible, affordable, high-quality public universities and colleges.

With my MA and PhD from California public universities and my private-college BA partly paid for by Cal grants, I am the realization of that vision of opportunity. But am I a member of the last only only generation whom that vision benefitted?

Declining public funding for higher education has been a consistent trend for the past twenty years. In the California State University in 1965, the state general fund paid $15 for every $1 a student paid in fees. In 2009, the state general fund paid $1.40 for every $1 a student paid in fees. That $15 in 1965 represented the public commitment to the idealistic vision of the Master Plan adopted in 1960. The decline in levels of funding didn’t become drastic until the 1990s, but it has been plummeting since then, and the speed of the plummet seems to be constantly accelerating. As Yudof reports, in 1960 the UC received 7% of the state’s budget; today it receives 3%, and since 1990 the amount of the state funding per student in the UC has dropped 50%.

Last year, before the state budget for fiscal year 2009-10 was set, I received an “Open Letter to UC Alumnae and Friends” from the past and present Chairs of the UC Board of Regents and President Yudof. The letter asked us to contact our legislators and urge them to continue to support public funding for the UC system. That letter contained this information:

In the past 20 years, the amount of money allotted to the University through the state budget has fallen dramatically: General Fund support for a UC student stood at $15,860 in 1990. If current budget projections hold, it will drop this year to $7,680.

I was a graduate student in the UC in 1990. I was able to be a graduate student in the UC because the citizens of California were willing to support the UC system at a level in 1990 that was twice as high as the support it receives today. As the letter points out, this downward trend in public support for higher education has been accompanied by another trend:

In the same time frame, by the way, funding for state prisons has more than doubled, from $5 to $11 billion. It's been reported that, based on current spending trends, California's prison budget soon will overtake that of the state's universities and community colleges.

The Chancellor of the California State University System, Charles Reed, published an Op-Ed piece in the San Francisco Chronicle on July 27, 2009, in which he wrote:

During the budget debate, it became clear to me that something unthinkable has happened in California: Our fiscal meltdown has so distorted our legislative priorities that we are now a state that places a higher priority on prison than on higher education.

Chancellor Reed notes in his editorial that the budget cuts will cause 40,000 students to be turned away from the CSU. He writes:

The idea of turning away students is anathema to those of us who revere California's Master Plan for Higher Education and its once-proud tradition of accessible, quality higher education for all. It is a sign to me that California has completely reneged on its promise of opportunity to its people.

The state kept its promise to me in that it provided me the opportunity to get the highest level of education possible—a PhD. But if it shuts the public education door behind me, what kind of society will I be spending my old age in? I would much rather spend it in a state in which there were a large number of university-educated citizens, in particular a well-educated pool of healthcare workers, available.

Chancellor Reed goes on to say:

On the flip side, consider that California's prisons set the state back more than $10 billion per year. . . Now for the final injustice: It costs $49,000 per year to keep a prisoner behind bars in California. However, the state's contribution per student at the CSU is just $4,600. This dichotomy is not just outrageous, it's tragic. For such a relatively small amount of money, a young person could get a good education, secure a meaningful job and become a contributing member to the community and the economy. But instead of preserving this small investment in our young people, our leaders would rather spend 10 times as much to keep prisoners behind bars.

I think Reed accurately identifies a cultural shift—Californians are now more willing to fund prisons than to fund higher education.

One of the very odd things about this is that during the years when the increase in funding for prisons and the decrease in funding for higher education have been steepest, the crime rate in California has actually been falling. Precipitously. In 2008, the most recent year for which statistics are available on the California Attorney General’s website, the rate of violent crimes per 100,000 population was 485.6, lower than it has been since 1971. The rate reached its height in 1993 (1058.6 per 100,000) and has declined steadily ever since then. Nonetheless, between 1991-98, California had a 44% rise in its incarceration rate while the crime rate dropped 36.

As of 2008, California had about 171,000 adults in state prisons. Why so many prisoners? In 1994 California passed the infamous “three strikes” law, which applies to non-violent as well as violent felonies. (Just to put this in perspective, the U.S. as a whole has the highest prison population rate in the world, with 756 people incarcerated for every 100,000 in population. Closest behind us is Russia with 629 per 100,000. California alone has more people in prison than France, Great Britain, German, Japan, Singapore and the Netherlands put together.) Not only has California got a large number of people in prisons; Californians want to keep them there. In 2008 Gov. Schwarzenegger proposed releasing 22,000 nonviolent offenders early to help solve the budget crisis, but this proposal created a huge oppositional outcry. California has, in fact, made it harder for prisoners to gain “early release” by passing Proposition 9 in 2008, known as “Marsy’s law,” which prevents prisoners from receiving credits toward early release awarded for good behavior or participation in particular programs. It also increases the amount of time inmates have to wait in between parole consideration hearings. (To find out more about California prisons and the victims’ rights groups that are financed by the prison guards’ union see the Prison Law Blog).

And what does this cost? California spends more than $10 billion a year on state prisons, spending 10 times as much on incarcerating each inmate than it allocates per student in the California State University System. Following logic of where the money goes, the Master Plan for Higher Education seems to be morphing into the Master Plan for Incarceration.

Contemporary Californians, unlike their predecessors in 1960, seem completely unwilling to consider making higher education a greater priority than prisons. On May 4, 2010, the Los Angeles Times reported that state revenues lagged 30% behind what had been projected, worsening the budget outlook for the 2010-11 fiscal year. The Times reported that the shortfall “could mean even deeper cuts in government services — schools, healthcare for the poor and services for the elderly. Lawmakers may also be forced to consider more reductions in funds for public universities, as well as tax hikes.” No mention of the possibility of cuts to prisons. This represents a real cultural change: Ronald Reagan, as governor back in the sixties, initiated an early release program that reduced the prison population to the point where he could actually close a state prison (see Schlosser article cited below).

Why has this change come about, given that the crime rate now is as low as it was in 1971 and the majority of prisoners are incarcerated for non-violent crimes?

Eric Schlosser, in his 1998 Atlantic article, “The Prison-Industrial Complex,” attributes the phenomenon to “a set of bureaucratic, political, and economic interests that encourage increased spending on imprisonment, regardless of the actual need.” He emphasizes the growth in the rate of imprisonment for nonviolent crimes “that in other countries would usually lead to community service, fines, or drug treatment -- or would not be considered crimes at all” but which “in the United States now lead to a prison term, by far the most expensive form of punishment.”

Schlosser cites a stunning statistic: about 70% of inmates in U.S. prisons are illiterate. This strongly suggests that social programs and education would be much better answers than prison growth. Let’s educate ourselves and educate others and realign our values.