Prisons or Schools?

The debate is long-standing and may be cited here as “which came first, the chicken or the egg?” But here the correct response is clear, at least for reasonable people: It is better to invest in schools than in prisons. The first will help to improve quality of life, education and moral values; the later only serves sooner or later to foster crime and increase the prison population.

Just last week, Occupy Wall Street in area of the western United States called for a national day in support of political prisoners — including the Cuban Five — and everyone who suffers from a totally unjust and inhumane system that clearly shows its racist and classist essence.

On the subject, Adwoa Masozi of the Institute for Policy Studies published an article on Tuesday in which she declares that we are witnessing a reversal in educational priorities that ultimately criminalizes poor blacks and people of color in general, and steals public education to feed the prison industrial complex.

The facts provided by Masozi are irrefutable, and of the 50 states that make up the Union, 38 are bleeding billions of dollars from their education budgets, according to facts from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. However, 22 percent of the United States population is functionally illiterate. Figures from the National Center or Education Statistics affirm that 68 million people read below basic levels, but less money is spent on education. She uses Texas as an example, where they have eliminated $4 billion from the budget along with the financing of programs that serve 100,000 at risk children.

Other cuts have forced public schools to close, like in California, where — believe it or not — they even devised and published a “best practices guide” for carrying out the disastrous policy.

Needless to say, without an education there are even less employment opportunities, and unemployment creates very serious imbalances in society, impacting quality of life, mental and physical health, and causing a host of constraints; in a few words, marginalization, the formation of a subclass, and sooner or later just one course: crime and prison.

And the numbers are exact: Of the 2.3 million prisoners in the United States, 46 percent lack a high school diploma and don’t have the skills to compete in an ever-shrinking job market.

As Masozi affirms in her article, “Public education is something more than a right, a liberty, or a privilege. It is a need. One as basic and inarguable as the land we must walk on, food we must eat, water we must drink, and air we must breathe to live.” Her argument delves still deeper in the American problem when she asks who would want their children to go to a school that has a police presence and metal detectors instead of books, or to crammed schools where teachers are scarce.

But more is invested in prisons, and she cites corporations like Wells Fargo, Bank of America, J.P. Morgan and Walmart, big also in the business of private prisons, which give them greater profits for the greater the number of inmates, and who are linked to the formulating of and influence in educational policies.

Rich and poor, prisons and schools are intertwined in a highly damaging system.