By C1 Staff
A new report released this week by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities claims that states are trending toward spending more on prisons than on education.
Huffington Post reports that the report shows a 140 percent growth of prison-related expenses between 1986 and 2013.
State spending on K-12 education increased by only 69 percent in the same time period. Higher education only saw an increase of six percent.
The report went on to say that the likelihood that an offender will be incarcerated has gone up across the board for all crimes.
Rates of violent crime and property crime have actually fallen over the years, while incarceration rates have risen.
Michael Mitchell, a co-author of the report, suggested that education spending could actually help lower incarceration rates.
The report suggests that states’ spending practices are ultimately harming their economies, while not necessarily making states especially safer.
The authors ultimately conclude that if “states were still spending the same amount on corrections as they did in the mid-1980s, adjusted for inflation, they would have about $28 billion more available each year for education and other productive investments.”