DOE Reports that Incarceration Spending Outweighs Education Spending

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Department of Education (DOE) released a report, titled Trends in State and Local Expenditures on Corrections and Education, in July that said state and local spending on prisons and jails has increased at triple the rate of funding for public education for preschool grade PK-12 education in the last three decades.

According to the report, 23 states increased per capita spending on creations at more than double the rate of increases in per-pupil PK-12 spending, even with population changes included. Seven states — Idaho Michigan, Montana, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota and West Virginia — even increased corrections budgets more than five times as fast as they did the budgets for PK-12 public education. Higher education also didn’t fare well, with state and local spending on higher education being largely flat since 1990 even though spending on corrections has increased 89 percent.

The report was conducted in response to former U.S. Education Secretary Anne Duncan’s call to action last September to invest in education rather than prisons by finding alternative paths for offenders outside of incarceration. In that speech, she said that if our states and localities took just half the people convicted of nonviolent crimes and found paths for them other than incarceration, they would save upwards of $15 billion a year. That would be enough to give a 50 percent raise to teachers and principals in high-need schools.

While the report is quite bleak, the DOE has already made strides in helping education incarcerated individuals. In late June, the DOE announced that about 12,000 incarcerated students will enroll in the new Second Chance Pell pilot program, which allows eligible incarcerated Americans to receive Pell Grants and pursue postsecondary education.

In April, the DOE also announced a $5.7 million grant program, in partnership with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, and released a toolkit to provide guidance to educators supporting the re-entry system for formerly incarcerated youth and adults, according to a statement. The program aims to improve outcomes for students involved in the criminal justice system by providing career and technical education.