By: Cassie Morden Courtesy of http://visual.ly/education-vs-incarceration, this infographic shows facts about the United States's funding for education and incarceration. At the bottom is a statistic that the US is number 20 in education globally, but first in incarceration. Why can't it be the other way around? Why can't the US focus more on the education system, and less on putting people away to meet the quota?
3 Comments
Samantha Driscoll
10/26/2014 07:14:41 am
I think that the two issues, having a high prison population and low funding for education, are correlated to each other. The low funding for education leads to low income families having even more trouble putting their children through school, and as the info graphic would suggest, most inmates did not complete a basic high school education. I think the solution for this issue is in no way simple or immediate, and would take many years to accomplish. However, once we can manage to focus funding on education and less on prisons, I believe we will see an immediate decrease in the prison population. In my opinion, education is a fundamental right and all americans should have the freedom and ability to receive one. So it baffles me that we would spend less money on improving this right and more money on taking freedom away from American citizens.
Josh Andrade
11/4/2014 08:43:52 am
Can you provide the comparison between the US and other foreign countries and if they prefer education or punishment? 11/4/2014 01:58:05 pm
This infographic is disturbing, to say the least, as it sums up the social injustice of our generation at the supported by our tax dollars. I appreciate that the infograophic compares money spent on schools to money spent on prisons because these two aspects of society go hand-in-hand. The more educated that a person is, the less likely they are to be incarcerated (it explicitly says that only 1/100 prisoners are college-educated!). The fact that our national budget is more committed to building prisons than public schools explains why we continue to see an increase in prison population. The relationship between education and incarceration is real, it is quantifiable, and it is astonishing when you recognize which of the two institutions is the priority. Leave a Reply. |