Education is cheaper than prison

It is sometimes popular to object to education spending on the grounds that we aren’t getting what we pay for with the money we invest now.

But that depends on how you measure success and how we define “good investment.”

At three locations around the Mat-Su Borough Wednesday, supporters of public education took to the pavement to deliver a message to the Valley’s state legislative delegation that voters here value kids, not cuts.

It’s easy to say we want more for our money and freeze funding until some magic day where variables like poverty and food insecurity can be overcome by legislators’ demands.

We’re not saying we can’t make our school system better. We are saying our schools beat the hell out of our prisons.

We’ve cited the research here before that shows Alaska spends more than three times more to house a prisoner than to educate a student. Read the Oct. 25, 2013, editorial “Better behind desks than behind bars” online at bit.ly/1kP0FgF.

We’ve shared research conducted in partnership between the University of Alaska Anchorage Justice Center and the Anchorage Police Department that shows the longer a student stays in school — even one semester makes a big difference — the less likely he or she is to end up behind bars.

The reality is we spend about $52,000 a year to house each prisoner, and in 2010 we spent about $16,675 to educate a single student.

We waste millions every year warehousing people who failed as members of society without asking for any evidence that our investment in incarceration is working to prevent crime. Every day we add more people to the list of those we as Alaskans will pay to incarcerate while they repay their debts to society. And nearly all of the people behind bars now will be released.

All of this is why we are loud advocates for the full funding of education on an annual basis. We prefer to build schools, buy desks, pay teachers salaries and fund their retirement plans because we favor investing in schools above wasting more money on prisons.

These aren’t scare tactics. Just facts. When we fail to prepare kids to pull their own wagons, to be self-sufficient, contributing members of society, we add to the likelihood that we will pay instead to house them as prisoners.

Just a few days remain in the 90-day legislative session, which is set to wrap April 20. Mat-Su Borough residents joined parents in Anchorage and Juneau and organized three local rallies on April 9 to send a message to the Legislature: Kids not cuts.

Without an increase in the base student allocation set by the Legislature, Alaska students will see another year of growing class sizes fueled by teacher layoffs. Class size matters when it comes to keeping kids in the classroom and out of prisons.

Additional cuts that will fuel greater reductions in teaching staff is not a recipe for savings or student success.

In the simplest terms, we stand with public school students, parents, teachers, staff and administrators because we know it is cheaper to educate a student — even if we tripled annual education spending — than it is to warehouse a prisoner.