NAACP: More Education, Less Incarceration

The NAACP  recently released a report that draws a direct connection between increasing criminal justice budgets and shrinking education budgets, Using data from six cities - New York City, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Indianapolis, Jackson, MS, and Houston -- the NAACP argues in Misplaced Priorities: Overincarcerate, Undereducate, that new investments need to be made in diverting young offenders from the justice system, providing support to those reentering their community after incarceration, and more.
The handling of drug-related offenses get prominent attention. Among the report's findings:

• "The nation’s reliance on incarceration to respond to social and behavioral health issues is evidenced by the large numbers of people who are incarcerated for drug offenses. Among people in federal prisons, people in local jails, and young people held in the nation’s detention centers and local secure facilities, more than 500,000 people— nearly a quarter of all those incarcerated—are incarcerated as the result of a drug conviction."

The report appropriately points out that people of color are disproportionately represented among the incarcerated -- but also found that had schools with the worst performance were clustered in neighborhoods with the highest incarceration rates.
And nothing sums up the NAACP's basic argument about "misplaced priorities" better than this statistic:

• "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."