The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

Given the stakes, it's frustrating to watch the discussion in Washington and on the news shows wander away from obvious solutions ("Buy American" policies, mortgage renegotiation, and increased oversight of bailout beneficiaries are such no-brainers it's hard to believe anybody serious would actually waste precious time debating them) and end up mired in ridiculous distractions and nit-picky details. This is a moment for a big vision, painted in bold strokes. We need our own shelf full of challenging new ideas that will shake up people's assumptions, change the terms of the discussion, and expand the country's ideas about what's possible in this unique moment.

Here are five Big Ideas that deserve to have a much wider hearing if we're really serious about getting America back up and running.
I am skipping to the one on prisons...for the full list, go to the URL above...
4
Close some prisons.

As I noted in a recent article , state governments are having a rough time right now in no small part because so many of them are bound by balanced budget amendments that prevent them from resorting to deficit spending as an option in bad times. Many of them are running deficits anyway, in direct violation of their own constitutions.

Given that state prison spending grows faster than education every year—and that prison costs are devouring state budgets from coast to coast, even as crime hits record lows—the first, best step toward balancing unstable state budgets may be to take a good hard look at how much we spend on prisons, and whether we're actually getting our money's worth.

And it may be an idea whose time has come. A recent poll in California found that voters of both parties ranked the public schools and health care as number one and two, respectively, on their list of public goods that must be protected during the state's financial crisis. Prisons, on the other hand, were at the very bottom of their list. They're more than ready to let this go.

Still finding the political will to do this is incredibly hard. Like defense contractors, the prison industry has a tremendous constituency, especially in the growing number of small towns where the prison is now the only major employer. Closing prisons throws thousands of people out of work. But it's also not the kind of public infrastructure investment that pays off in the long run.

As CAF research director Eric Lotke pointed out in a recent post:

Even as states spend nearly $50 billion on prisons every year and counties spend over $20 billion on jails, we build additional locked capacity. Even with U.S. incarceration rates at seven times historical and international norms, we build. Even as crime continues on its 15-year descent to levels not seen in 40 years, we find money to build even more.

The sacrifices we make to build these prisons are astonishing. Between 1987 and 2007, state spending on prisons increased by 40 percent (as a percent of the general fund). State spending on higher education decreased by 30 percent. We are financing our prisons by cutting our colleges.

We continue to build even though prisons are often disappointing for economic development. The best jobs go to people from out of town, and dollars spent on prisons have little “multiplier” effect. They don’t generate future additional dollars of economic activity, as do dollars spent on transportation, schools and so forth. Every dollar invested in highway construction generates $2.50 of gross domestic product in the short term. Raising teacher wages by 10 percent is associated with a 5 percent decrease in drop-out rates. But still we shortchange our schools and other rural enterprise, and build new prisons....

That’s where federal assistance can come in. Part of the infrastructure/investment/stimulus money can be directed to cover transitional costs out of the prison economy. A few billion dollars of federal money in the short term can help states break the prison hammerlock, and free them to redirect tens of billions of state dollars to other purposes—from schools to roads to hospitals.

Cutting money for schools, colleges, and hospitals pretty much guarantees that we're going to need more prisons down the road. The current crisis may be the moment we've been looking for to tell the private prison companies and corrections unions that enough is enough. We don't need what they're selling us anymore. And we can't afford it, either.

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These are just a few examples. The point is that in the middle of these tough times, things are becoming possible that have never been possible before. Small risks, small actions, or small ideas are unworthy of the moment, and of us. It's time for us to get beyond the old assumptions, and start to think big enough to stir the soul of the country.

Bernie Horn, Eric Lotke, Susan Ozawa, and David Sirota all participated in the development of this article.
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