Doug Berman picked up on a post by Dan Filler over at the Faculty Lounge about the trade-off between dollars spent on education and the reduction in crime.
A national organization called Fight Crime: Invest in Kids is pushing a new study showing that a ten percent increase in the number of high schoolers earning their degrees will cut 3,000 murders and 175,000 murders [?] in the United States. And how do we spike those graduation rates? Bigger investments in pre-K programs, of course.
Whether it’s 3,000 or 175,000 murders isn’t the point (and I have no clue either), but even 3,000 murders is a decent reduction, especially if you’re one of the 3,000 people being murdered.
Too frequently we see crime framed as a matter of individual flaws and failures. Admittedly, progressives are less inclined to view matters this way, but law enforcement officials — who are often battling for tougher criminal laws — often invoke this individualistic rhetoric to justify their support for harsh punishments. Whatever the empirical basis for believing that harsh punishment will deter crime, it’s clear that the public cottons to more retributive explanations for tougher criminal law. And retributive explanations are grounded in some notion that crime is caused by moral depravity — rather than a lack of school funding.
It’s a shame that Filler feels compelled to analyze this in terms of political philosophy, because a decent case can be made for people from all sides of political debate that putting funds into education is consistent with their philosophy.
But the bigger question, which both Doug and Dan properly ask, is why this obvious solution is never really put on the table and given serious consideration.
Dan attributes it to the public’s blood lust, the demand for “retributive explanations for tougher criminal law.” They are less concerned with fixing problems that payback. Payback feels good. Payback provides a visceral release. Educating children smacks of communism.
Granted, no amount of education is going to eliminate crime. There will always be people who are morally bankrupt. But education will have a significant impact on those who commit crime because they are financially bankrupt.
Aside from other good reasons to educate children, its potential for reducing crime has great macroeconomic significance. It’s expense to police, prosecute and imprison lots and lots of people. And the United States has a ton of us in prison. This costs a bloody fortune. It makes a lot of people miserable and creates a self-perpetuating population of criminals, since it’s not like they come out of prison with their medical degree ready to start their internship. The subculture of ex-cons, perpetual societal pariahs, continues to drain us, as well as make their lives miserable and untenable. In other words, we aren’t accomplishing anything except fulfilling this good ol’ American blood lust for retribution.
So why don’t politicians promote this shift in priorities? For one thing, it’s too complicated to communicate in a ten second sound bite, the primary method of political discourse in America. For another, it’s proactive, which means politically risky. They can get so much more bang for the buck by naming bad laws after dead children.
And then there’s the cost factor. Since we already have crime, putting more money in education means taking it from somewhere else. You can’t take it from the current prison budgets since that would appear to be soft on crime, and we all know that no successful politician can advocate that. It could be paid for by dropping a few less billion dollar bombs on foreign despots, but that would be overtly unAmerican while we are in a constant state of war. Can you imagine using funds for educating American children rather than bringing democracy to the middle east (where they will welcome us as liberators)?
There is also the negative perception of the business of education itself, as a mechanism to shift tax dollars from our pockets to the pockets of teacher union members without actually providing any benefit to children. This is a very real problem, particularly since our politicians derive much of their income political support from teachers’ unions. You can’t piss off the people who grease your skids.
So there you are, a partial solution that will pay for itself, maybe even pay for more than itself, which no one is willing to bring to the forefront. We’re a strange and sorry lot, preferring to lock up adults rather than educate children.
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Well, sure: the best crime prevention program is a good education. We could review the literature that shows that, or just save time and ask “how many graduated-with-honors students do you find in Sing Sing or Stillwater?” Most — not all — people who end up in prison are playing out a real lousy hand.
On the other hand, my school district spends just about $18000 per student per year — more in constant dollars than it did twenty years ago, when the Minneapolis Public Schools were the (or at least a) crown jewel of the national education system. And they suck; it takes a whole lot of work and luck for a parent to get their kid a good education out of the MPS. What’s happened in that generation isn’t a lack of money — or, for that matter, a lack of good, dedicated teachers and administrators. (In my own experience, the conservative stereotype of a lazy, burned-out unionized public school teacher who is just punching a clock is just this side of mythical; I could tell you stories.)
It used to be a pretty safe bet that if you could get a kid into kindergarten in the MPS, he or she would get out with a high school diploma, a decent education, and a very small chance of standing in front of a judge at a sentencing hearing. That stopped being true quite a while ago.
Where my conservative friends are right is where they say that just “throwing money at the schools” hasn’t worked, and is unlikely to work.
Retribution is expensive incarceration costs between $20,000 to $30,000 per inmate-year a lot more than primary and secondary education.
If you assume that passing a state budget is a zero-sum-game the money for increased retribution has to be taken from some other part of the budget. If you look at how money is distributed in a typical state budget there are only two areas that funds can be transferred from. One is health and human services and the other is education.
If you are interested in educating your children you better keep an eye on what your legislators are doing about retribution.
That analysis is every bit as flawed as my conservative friends’ one based on the lazy union teacher thing; it assumes that if we spend more money on education, we will spend less on incarceration.
In some cases, that’s demonstrably false. Where I live, a huge percentage of our criminal class are imports from Chicago and Indianapolis. Even assuming that another, say, $10K per pupil here would lower incarceration rates for Minnesotans, it won’t do a lick of good about folks who came from either of those places after their educational system failed them.
(We could lower incarceration rates dramatically by decriminalizing recreational pharmaceutical use, but the polity — here and elsewhere — seems to think it’s important to keep prison sentences short for robbers, muggers, murderers and rapists so that there’ll be ample space for drug dealers’ addict girlfriends who have nobody to flip on.)
There are two wholly unrelated issues at play here. One being whether education will dramatically impact crime and the other being how to accomplish education.
I tend to side closer to the conservatives on the subject of money thrown blindly at schools as if dollars per pupil equals improved education. Pay teachers more and you have higher paid teachers. The bulk of education money, and the focus of educational policy, has been wasteful and counterproductive. But that doesn’t mean that education is bad or that it can’t be both improved and expanded.
To a large extent, the focus of education in the context of reducing crime must be urban schools, where there is a combined problem of poor facilities, underpaid teachers (as opposed to the handsomely paid teachers in suburban schools), and lack of parental and community appreciation and support.
I’m not suggesting that these are easy problems to solve, though initiatives within the educational community have failed miserably because they are incapable of recognizing hard realities and internal failings. There is a cycle of failure that needs to be squarely confronted, and this is what criminal defense lawyers, who see people on the back end of failure, see all too clearly.
But the money issues of education are very real, but entirely separate. Education presents multi-faceted problems, but that just means we have more than one problem to solve.
Other than the “wholly unrelated” thing, I couldn’t agree more. Except for the optimism.
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