This year, the University of California, Berkeley library will be closed Saturdays and won’t be open 24 hours during finals week as it has previously. University of California, Los Angeles will offer approximately 165 fewer classes across the university. While the higher public education system continues to deal with cuts, the state hasn’t stopped pouring funding into prisons. Over the past two decades, California has built 20 prisons and currently houses more inmates than France, Great Britain, Germany, Japan, Singapore and the Netherlands combined. The connection between these two facts is in the financing of these separate, but heavily linked, institutional systems.
California can expect a $20.7 billion deficit for the 2009-10 fiscal year, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office. The budget plan legislature passed calls for $12.4 billion in additional funding for the prison expansion program, AB900, but slashes $9.5 billion from an already struggling K-12 public education system and $2 billion from the higher-education system. This $12.4 billion is set to finance 53,000 more prison and jail cells, while temporarily ignoring the need for the annual $1.5 billion the already-broke state will need to operate them.
With such a large shortage, the state has strongly turned to the public education system, as well as health care, public works projects and social services, to fund the growing prison business. As the proposed budget intends to add 1,200 prison staff this year, school districts are obligated to lay off teachers. The University of California, one of the nation’s leading public university systems, is being forced to reduce its budget by $812 million. UCs have seen a 600 percent fee increase between 1980 and 2004, with the California State University system seeing a staggering 1,188 percent increase. In dollar amounts, the CSU fees have gone from approximately $231 to $2,976. While unpaid furloughs lessen the blow in the short term, they will only cover about a quarter of the shortfall.
On a larger scale than just this current budget, the trend has been headed this way for a while. The National Association of State Budget Officers shows that between 1987 and 2007, the corrections expenditures per state more than doubled, while spending on higher education hasn’t risen by a quarter. While graduation rates between 1984 and 2004 fell by 2.7 percent, the prison population increased by 400 percent. In the 1990s, more prisons were built in California than between the opening of the first prison in 1852 through 1980.
The Prison Industrial Complex is a set of bureaucratic, political and economic interests that have fueled this development in pursuit of profit. It is to the point of having expanded the prison population by about 50 percent while, in the same 18 years, seeing a decrease of violent crime by about 20 percent. The prison budget now comprises over 10 percent of the overall budget, having grown by 52 percent in the last five years, making it the fastest growing state expense. Angela Davis, a highly respected professor, activist and author, expresses that mass imprisonment generates profit as it devours social wealth, including, probably most importantly, education. These interest groups corrupt the criminal justice system in pursuit of capital, while, as the Sacramento Bee put it, “sucking the life out of higher education” in California.
Critical funding cuts to the UC, CSU and California Community College systems are presumed to hit the citizens of California where it hurts more than ever — their wallets — thereby affecting their access to education and the door out of the vicious cycle of poverty. With data to support the correlation between low educational attainment and ending up in prison, it is not only a short sighted decision, but it is a crime against the underprivileged to continue wasting money enforcing draconian laws and overcrowding corporately-backed prisons rather than providing all Americans, and Californians, the chance to obtain a decent and affordable education.