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JUDY WOODRUFF:According toa report out today from the NAACP, states are spending increasingly large sums of money on prisons, at the expense of public education.
Its research shows states spend more than $50 billion annually on government-run correction programs. In the last 20 years, state spending on prisons has grown at six times the rate of spending on higher education. And one in 31 Americans is under some form of corrections control.
The effort to address the problem, identified in the report titled "Misplaced Priorities," has attracted a measure of bipartisan support.
And joining us now is Benjamin Jealous—he's president ofthe NAACP—and Grover Norquist. He's the head ofAmericans for Tax Reform.
Gentlemen, it's good to see both of you this evening.
JUDY WOODRUFF:Ben Jealous, let me start with you. What do you think is the most important finding from this study, this report?
BENJAMIN JEALOUS,NAACP: Our country has 5 percent of the world's people, 25 percent of the world's people in prison.
And we have too many people in prison. And what's clear is that the policies that have put them there are failing us. Now, we know that there are policies that can make us safer that cost less, that are more effective. And the time has come for us to actually choose those policies, stop wasting money, stop wasting lives and stop needlessly breaking up families.
JUDY WOODRUFF:And how do you know that there's a connection to education, that spending, which is one thing the report recommends...
BENJAMIN JEALOUS:Sure.
JUDY WOODRUFF:... that spending less—that it's smart to spend less on incarceration and more on education? How do you prove that?
BENJAMIN JEALOUS:... take it in two pieces.
So, on the one hand, we know that, for instance, drug rehab, dollar for dollar, is seven times more effective for dealing with nonviolent drug addicts, which are the bulk of people in prison, than jail or prison. On the other hand, we also know that, if you look, for instance, at the state of California, when California was known to really have the best public universities in the entire world, like in the '70s and '80s, they were spending 3 percent of their state budget on prisons and 11 percent on their colleges and universities.
Today, they're not known to have the best in the world anymore. They spend 10-plus percent on prisons and 7 percent on colleges and universities. Let me say, Pennsylvania had a big budget battle a couple of years ago. They took several hundred million straight out of the ed budget and put it into a hole in the prison budget.
And we know that when kids don't the high-quality teachers and the resources that they need, they simply don't perform as well.
JUDY WOODRUFF:So, you see a correlation here.
Grover Norquist, fair to say you and Ben Jealous don't see eye to eye on every policy question out there. What was it about this that caused you to want to be involved?
GROVER NORQUIST,Americans For Tax Reform: Well, over the last four or five years, I have been involved with a working group in D.C. of conservatives, center-right activists, who are concerned that conservatives have not participated in trying to rethink both prisons and federal and state corrections, judicial systems.
And over that time, this has become a larger and larger part of state budgets. It's become very expensive. A lot of people just sort of said, whatever the prosecutors ask for, give it to them in the budget.
And when you look at it, you're seeing a lot of people are sent to prison who perhaps ought not to be in prison, in terms of some cost-benefit analysis. And, again, we're conservatives. I think there are a bunch of people who deserve to be in prison forever. I think there are some people that deserve to be in prison for a long time.
I don't get weepy about the whole idea. But we are keeping some people in prison who might be better off in drug rehabilitation or under other kinds of house arrest or other kinds of control, other than very expensive prisons.
