Pubdate: Mon, 21 Apr 2003 Source: Clarion-Ledger, The (MS) Copyright: 2003 The Clarion-Ledger Contact: http://www.clarionledger.com/about/letters.html Website: http://www.clarionledger.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/805 Author: Rev. Jeremy Tobin STATE'S FUTURE WITH EDUCATION NOT WITH PRISONS Private, for-profit prisons are sapping vital resources from education and the future of our children. For-profit corporations have convinced many states, including Mississippi, that they can run prisons cheaper and more effectively than the state's penal system. A growing body of data has emerged to show that this is not the case. Like other parts of the country, Mississippi has placed several for-profit prisons in depressed communities with the promise of jobs. The communities remain depressed. A limited number from the community, as well as outside the community, fill the fixed number of positions needed to run the prison. Education Costs Less However, the communities are affected, and people are beginning to see the connection. Our public schools are a wreck. Some districts, often in these same deprived communities, are barely able to stay afloat as money needed for education is funneled into prisons. It costs much more to incarcerate a person than to educate a person. In Virginia and Mississippi, for instance, a college education is $4,000 cheaper than the cost of incarceration. A significant portion of our state's budget goes to corrections even though violent crime in Mississippi has dropped to the lowest rate in years. Instead, we are filling a system that profits off non-violent offenders taking up space. Grass-roots Leadership, a coalition of activists in several Southern states, issued a report last spring, during a news conference on the Capitol steps, entitled, "Education versus Incarceration, a Mississippi Case Study." This study clearly spells out that education and prevention programs are cheaper than incarceration and keep more people productive and out of prison. Mississippi is facing a huge economic downturn. The governor has closed one for-profit prison, Delta State Correctional Facility in Greenwood, owned by Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), and has renegotiated contracts with other prison facility providers. School Budgets Imperiled The writing is on the wall. We can no longer afford to see our school districts collapse as money is diverted to fill beds to meet contractual requirements for providers of for-profit prisons. This became apparent when it became known that taxpayers were paying for "ghost inmates" (empty beds to meet contracts). At one point private prisons were to be fully funded, while the state correctional system had its budget cut. It is not only about money. Our future is at stake. Our punitive criminal justice system is supplying a steady flow of inmates to fill prisons. By commissioning studies to track children's lack of progress at the third-grade level in order to plan the number of cells needed in the future, we are playing a draconian game that turns the list of core American values on its head. Public education is the bedrock of American democracy, as Thomas Jefferson so clearly described. To have a semi-literate mass feeding prisons, unable to exercise their right to vote when they get out, is a danger to our way of life. It is cheaper to educate well, and to provide adequate public schools in every community in our nation and our state. It takes will and determination for those who set policy and priorities. Even with the current financial situation in Mississippi, we can and we must make public education the best it can be for every child in every community in Mississippi. Our future hangs in the balance. _____ The Rev. Jeremy Tobin is associate pastor of Christ the King Church in Jackson and a contributing writer to the Mississippi Forum, a nopartisan educational organization. To contact: Mississippi Forum, P.O. Box 3515, Jackson, MS 39207-3515. - --- MAP posted-by: Beth