By California’s capital interest in the prison system is growing at the expense of higher education. The state is bankrolling the prison industry and packing the wrong institutions to the brim.
Even though public schools are pleading for more funding, the state continues to hold more money back, and students have to pay the price in the end. As a result, the financial burden for students increases every year through tuition and fees.
The National Association of State Budget Officers said that from 2011-2014, at four-year public institutions, tuition rose 7.4 percent. The quick rise in tuition comes from the lack of money received by schools from the state’s general fund, the primary source of funding for state universities.
“It’s just keeping the rich, rich and the poor, poor,” Victoria Gurrola, a freshman criminal Justice major at California State University, Long Beach, said. “Because how are the poor people ever going to get out of poverty if they can’t afford it. You’re not making it flexible.”
The state used 58.2 percent of the general fund for education in 1995, while in 2013, education’s portion of the general fund plummeted to 37.2 percent, according to the state’s expenditure report.
Meanwhile, the prison system receives 88.9 percent of its funding from the general fund.
“Give that money to students, like young people who haven’t reverted to crime yet, who want to be better, who want to be a part of society and actually do something meaningful,” said Gurrola.
The state policy makers decide how the general fund is divided up among the state’s public needs. Programs that allegedly require the most support receive the most funding.
Most people would say that education is a primary public need, but the state seems as if it couldn’t care less if we graduate.
“ . . . In the state of California or any state, when you see this paradox between incarceration, education and the effectiveness of either being more advantageous to the state, . . . what you’re going to find at the core of that is money and political will,” Dr. Tracy Tolbert, a criminology and criminal justice professor at CSULB, said. “ . . . Even as we move into what should be considered a more enlightened age . . . there’s no political will.”
It is now clear that the difficulties of affording college are a result of these kinds of astonishing fund allocations.
In the 21st century, the prison industrial complex has become a cash cow for investors. As the industry has increased in value, the education system is left neglected.
“State budgets are developed and distributed by politicians, and it depends on who’s in power.” Dr. Tolbert said. If the party is more interested in incarceration, then that is where the money will go.
The California Budget Project states that in California, K-12 schools rank 51st in the number of students per teacher, as well as 51st in the student-guidance counselor ratio.
This drop in funding greatly affects children living in the low-income neighborhoods where the K-12 schools are suffering the most. Public schools with little to no resources increase the chances that a child will drop out of school and turn to a life of crime.
As CSULB students we are part of an institution of higher learning and are obligated to be more aware of our state policy makers’ activities.
Voting is the first step to get your voice out, but only by working together as a whole will we garner the attention this issue deserves.
