Safiya Merchant

Battle Creek Enquirer

Michigan is one of seven states nationwide whose spending on jails and prisons has increased more than five times as rapidly as spending on public schools.

In a U.S. Department of Education report released this week, officials reported that from 1979-80 to 2012-13, state and local spending for pre-Kindergarten through 12th-grade public education increased by 107 percent, while spending on corrections swelled by 324 percent.

But in Michigan, pre-kindergarten through 12th-grade expenditures totaled about $14 billion in 1979-80 and $16.4 billion in 2012-13 -- about an 18 percent increase in spending. Corrections saw a 219 percent increase to $2.4 billion in 2012 from $761 million in 1979.

"Budgets reflect our values and the trends revealed in this analysis are a reflection of our nation's priorities that should be revisited," U.S. Secretary of Education John B. King Jr. said in a news release. "For far too long, systems in this country have continued to perpetuate inequity. We must choose to make more investments in our children's future. We need to invest more in prevention than in punishment, to invest more in schools, not prisons."

Michigan League for Public Policy Kids Count in Michigan Project Director Alicia Guevara Warren said the report shows "we're not investing in education the way that we could and that we need to be doing what we can to reduce spending in corrections."

"Some of this includes looking at things like early childhood programs, programs for at-risk youth, ensuring that we are increasing dollars for at-risk students, so we know that it takes more to educate students who have fewer resources," Guevara Warren said.

Education expenditures nationwide increased to $534 billion from $258 billion, while corrections expenditures quadrupled to $71 billion from $17 billion, according to a U.S. Department of Education news release.

From 1989 to 2013, state and local corrections spending jumped by 89 percent while allocations for higher education increased by 5 percent.

Guevara Warren said there has been bipartisan support to reduce corrections spending, but packages have stalled in the Legislature.

"We'd like to encourage that policymakers continue to work to pass these types of reforms," she said. "So we're looking at presumptive parole as a way to reduce our prison population, looking at the use of diversion courts as a way to ensure that people are getting the assistance that they need and we're not just putting them in prison and then really looking at greater investment in re-entry programs."

The Education Department report was released just a few weeks after a report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation said Michigan ranked 10th-worst in the nation for children's education.

The six other states whose corrections budgets increased more than five times as fast as education spending were Montana, Idaho, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota and West Virginia.

Contact Safiya Merchant at 269-966-0684 or smerchant@battlecreekenquirer.com. Follow her on Twitter: @SafiyaMerchant