NAACP blasts U.S. trend for spending more on incarceration than education

In his 1984 presidential run, the Rev. Jesse Jackson took issue with the nation's priorities - spending ever more money on imprisoning people than on educating them.

But with little progress over the decades, the national office of the NAACP raised the issue again last week with a report, "Misplaced Priorities: Under Educate, Over Incarcerate."

The report focuses on the problem in six cities, including Philadelphia.

It notes that in 2008 Pennsylvania taxpayers "spent nearly $281 million to imprison residents sentenced from just nine Philadelphia [zip codes]." Those zip codes account for about half of all adults sent to prison from Philadelphia that year.

Meanwhile, per student spending for the Philadelphia School District lags well behind many districts in the surrounding suburbs.

Ram Cnaan, associate dean of the School of Social Policy and Practice at the University of Pennsylvania, calls education key to trying to reduce the numbers of people going to state prisons.

"One thing we know is that education works," Cnaan said. "You either educate people before, or you educate them while they are in prison."

Cnaan and others, including the NAACP, contend that tough antidrug and anticrime laws adopted in the last three decades have fueled prison growth.

The nation, he said, is spending "way too much on prisons, the biggest growing industry in our country."

Every year states plan to build more prisons, Cnaan said. "They have to meet court orders, they have no choice.

"It is our society that wants to feel safe and wants to feel correct by sending people to prison for long sentences for relatively minor crimes."

Cnaan described the United States as "the most incarcerating society in the history of the human race."

He said the result is that when inmates return to their communities, "it is almost impossible for them to reintegrate."

Benjamin Todd Jealous, president and CEO of the NAACP, said in a telephone interview last week, that the nation should look to New York and other states that over the last decade have reduced prison populations through specialty courts and diversion programs such as drug rehabilitation. Jealous said crime in New York dropped faster than in states "that tried to control crime problems by incarceration."

"The first thing states need to do is form a criminal justice commission that looks at all state laws from beginning to end . . . and ask this question: 'Does this work, and does this make us safer?' " Jealous said.

Chad Dion Lassiter, president of the Black Men at Penn School of Social Work Inc., said jobs and education were critical to reducing the numbers of inmates and spending on incarceration.

"We have to combat mass incarceration with mass employment and mass education," Lassiter said.

"If you're cutting budgets for schools and people are unemployed, it's almost a blueprint for disaster."

Leon King, former commissioner of prisons for Philadelphia, agreed that more specialty courts and diversion programs could help in the city.

"That's the way to do it," King said. "People have been saying it for years, but the response has been, 'We don't have money for that.' . . . How about saying, 'We're not going to increase the prison budget anymore and we're going to actually divert this many people from prison.' "

Said Jealous, "Dollar for dollar, drug rehabilitation is seven times more effective than incarceration."

To push its message, the NAACP next month is launching a billboard campaign in Philadelphia and other cities, including at some airports.

The billboards will read: "Welcome to America, home to 5 percent of the world's people and 25 percent of the world's prisons. Let's build a better America together."

Jealous described the billboards as a conversation-starter. He said the call for reducing incarceration rates was drawing bipartisan support, adding that former House Speaker Newt Gingrich endorses the effort.

"The focus," Jealous said, "should be on doing what works and cutting bait with failed, so-called tough-on-crime policies that waste money and often make us less safe."

To view the NAACP report, go to www.naacp.org/pages/

misplaced-priorities

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