States’ Shameful Trade-Off: Putting Prisons over Public Schools

[Shallah Kali]

http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/7161/states_shameful_trade-off_putting_prisons_over_public_schools/

The state lawmakers who are pushing hard for "austerity" aren't so much enemies of government “waste” as they are expert money launderers in the business of politics. Education is at the center of their shell game.

Across the country, conservatives are fixated on a curious formula for deficit reduction: wholesale disinvestment in schools (coupled with erosion of union rights and working conditions for teachers), plus a race to pump tax breaks for the rich and stifle health care for the poor. And in many areas, one sacred cow continues to fatten while students starve: our bloated prison system.

snip

Civil rights advocates suspect that the “elsewhere” resides in political interests hostile to children. A new report by the NAACP, “Misplaced Priorities,” describes the systematic underfunding of education alongside massive resources diverted into draconian criminal justice systems--a pattern that indirectly creates perverse incentives for incarcerating, rather than educating vulnerable youth.

snip

There's a tragic financial and political logic to the trade-off between educational and criminal institutions. The so-called “school to prison pipeline”--which pushes youth, particularly low-income youth of color, into the criminal justice system—begins in heavily police-patrolled schools, sucks “delinquents” into a racially skewed juvenile justice system, and ends up cycling young adults through courts and prisons, further uprooting them from their communities. This pipeline isn't just a rhetorical metaphor; it's a real channel for taxpayer money that tends to go ignored because the families most impacted are politically invisible.

What Is GEO Group? : GEO Group, Wackenhut Corrections, is the nation's 2nd largest for-profit prison operator. One of its prisons is now being investigated by the Department of Justice, & a civil rights lawsuit alleges that juvenile inmates are being held in "barbaric & unconstitutional conditions
http://www.npr.org/2011/03/25/134852256/what-is-geo-group

Private jails profit off illegal immigration laws - Corrections Corporation of America, Geo Group (frm Wackenhut), & MTC are making millions off the crackdown on illegal aliens
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42197813/ns/business-bloomberg_businessweek/

Town Relies On Troubled Youth Prison, Walnut Grove, For Profits: First in a two-part series on private prisons - Southern Poverty Law Center & the ACLU have filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of 13 inmates against the prison operator, GEO Group, the prison administration & state officials
http://www.npr.org/2011/03/25/134850972/town-relies-on-troubled-youth-prison-for-profits

[applegrove]

1. When it comes to prisons the right certainly like the 'regulations' of the criminal justice

system. Very popular with the neocons in Canada too.

[raccoon]

2. K&R. nt