Better behind desks than behind bars

We’re still trying to wrap our minds around what it means to have so many new neighbors with so many social needs. We’re writing this fresh from the Community and Corrections Fall Forum in Wasilla today. Frankly, the data is staggering.

Homelessness, jobs, education, public transportation and medical care are some of the areas we anticipate will be affected by the addition of 1,200 new prisoners to the Valley. Why? Because 95 percent of people currently held by the Department of Corrections will be released.

We heard lots of good ideas at the forum Thursday. It was good to see there are so many people with a passion for this work.

But this is a big challenge, perhaps too large in scope to be left to the Valley’s nonprofit community to resolve. We see hopeful solutions in marrying this local prisoner re-entry effort with a similar conversation underway in the Legislature about making the corrections system in Alaska more cost-effective.

It’s worth investigating what we can save on corrections costs by modeling prison reforms already making headway in Michigan and Texas.

Some things are clear. How we invest state resources needs to change.

We now spend about $52,000 a year to house each prisoner. In Alaska in 2010, we spent $16,675 to educate a single student. Said another way, one year of incarceration costs about the same as three years of public school in Alaska.

We do not know why community members and legislators alike demand accountability from administrators, teachers and students for how every dollar is spent, but never decry the millions spent to keep people locked up. No one complains that our money is wasted when 66 percent of those released re-offend within three years, and we have to pay to warehouse them all over again.

Are these truly our priorities? Do we honestly value warehousing prisoners over educating our children?

If we upend these numbers to reflect what we believe is a more honest assessment of our values, here’s what we can expect, according to a newly released study from the University of Alaska Anchorage Justice Center, conducted by Sharon Chamard and Derek Hsieh from the Anchorage Police Department:

A one-year increase in average education levels reduces arrest rates overall by 11 percent, murder and aggravated assault by almost 30 percent each, motor vehicle theft by 20 percent, arson by 13 percent, and burglary and larceny by 6 percent, according to that study.

Another piece of research titled “Saving Futures, Saving Dollars: The Impacts of Education of Crime Reduction and Earnings,” by the Alliance for Excellent Education, estimates that if Alaska’s high school graduation rates increased by 5 percent, the total benefit to the Alaska economy would be $45.1 million. The bulk of that — $40.1 million — would come in crime-related savings.

Not all high school dropouts become criminals, but the same study found that young people ages 16 to 24 who drop out of high school are 63 times more likely to be institutionalized than their peers with a bachelor’s degree.

It seems obvious that we can’t truly look at prison reform without looking at how we invest in public education from Head Start through our university system. It is unconscionable that we willingly spend three times as much per year to warehouse a prisoner as we do to educate a public school student. These are not our values.