Comparing School and Prison Costs

In “Get Smart Replaces Lock ‘Em Up” (Commentary, Oct. 2), Charles Colson and Pat Nolan seriously misinform readers regarding the relation between public expenditures for incarceration and for education. They wrote, “The signs of the crisis are that we spend about five times more on incarceration than on schools.” Most readers are likely to take this to mean that altogether governments in the United States spend five times as much money on jails and prisons as on all public education.

In fact, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics of the U.S. Department of Justice, in 1990 (most recent year with published data) governments at all levels (federal, state and local) spent 13 times as much on “education and libraries” as they did to build and operate every prison and jail cell in the country. Indeed, the nation’s entire correctional budget amounts to only slightly more than 1% of all public spending.

Later Colson and Nolan apparently restate their earlier point: “There’s still another startling fact: Most states spend more than five times the amount per prisoner they spend educating their children.” It does indeed cost three to five times as much to incarcerate one prisoner for a year in a medium to maximum security prison than it does to educate one student in a public elementary or high school.

I conclude that prisons cost so much more per person than schools because we do not, after all, ask our schools to provide secure 24-hour housing, trained guards, three meals a day, laundry services and full dental and medical coverage.

JOSEPH M. BESSETTE

Associate Professor

Claremont McKenna College