According to an Alabama Press-Register report, neither schools nor students nor even teachers were the big winners from the state's education stimulus dollars. That accolade goes to Alabama's inmates and its prison system. And it was all perfectly legal.
Alabama's Department of Corrections received $118 million (or 11 percent) of the money doled out by the federal Department of Education in the first round of education-related stimulus funds (the Press-Register's analysis didn't look at the breakdown of Edujobs money). The stimulus package statutes allowed governors to earmark up to 18 percent of funds to areas other than education, like public safety.
So, Alabama, which gave over $40 million more of its education funds to prisons (to pay for inmate health care and officer salaries) than it did to education, acted in compliance with the law.
It's not a coincidence that only 2.4 percent of inmates in state prisons have earned a college degree, or that only 60 percent of state prison inmates have high school diploma or equivalent (compared to 88 percent of the general population). There have been gobs of reports explaining that educating prisoners (thus increasing their knowledge capital) leads to a reduction in recidivism rates. Yet, we take education money and use it to plug holes in the corrections system. We don't even use it for education programs within the correction system.
A little foresight in funding would go a long way.
?Daniela Fairchild
