NAACP Report Calls Shift in Funding Toward Prisons ‘Alarming’

On Thursday, the NAACP released a report called Misplaced Priorities that examines America’s escalating prison spending and its impact on state budgets, state educational systems, the stability of our inner city communities, and the well being of our children.

To amplify its point, the report profiled six cities: New York, Houston, Indianapolis, Jackson, MS, Philadelphia and, of course, Los Angeles.

This map of Los Angeles above shows the density of prison admissions per 1000 adults in various sectors of the LA county, and how well kids in those same parts of town are doing with math proficiencies. The results are sobering.

Here are a few of the other facts about LA that are in the report:

* 50 percent of the people who were in prison in California, and are now on parole in Los Angeles live in zip codes that are home to only 18 percent of the city’s adults.

* This means that more than a billion taxpayer dollars are spent every year to incarcerate people from Los Angeles neighborhoods where less than 20 percent of Los Angeles residents live.

* In Los Angeles, 69 of the 90 (67 percent) low performing schools are in neighborhoods with the highest incarceration rates.

* By contrast, 59 of the city’s 86 high performing schools (68 percent) are in neighborhoods with the lowest incarceration rates.

* During the last two decades, as the criminal justice system came to assume a larger proportion of state discretionary dollars, state spending on prisons grew at six times the rate of state spending on higher education. This is particularly true in California.

As state lawmakers in Sacramento talked Thursday, in deadly earnest, about bridging California’s budget gap, in part, by shutting some state universities—a UC or a CSU or two.—the NAACP report about our out of whack corrections spending seemed extremely timely.

There is much more in the report itself.

NAACP President Benjamin Jealous and born again prison spending reformer Grover Norquist were an effective odd couple on the PBS News Hour on Wednesday night with even more details on the topic.

Just to remind you, the US has five percent of the world’s population, and 25 percent of the world’s prisoners.