State budget: Locking our money up

In 2006, prison inmate Tashma McFadden was stabbed 32 times while in the Baltimore City Detention Center. McFadden has filed a lawsuit alleging that the attack was orchestrated by a rival gang member. And that gang member happened to be employed by the state — as a prison guard. Some of the biggest factors contributing to our prisons' many failures are overcrowding and under-funding. It's easy to understand why state prisons can't cope when you consider that between 1979 and 2003, the prison population more than tripled from 7,243 to 24,006 inmates. That fact, Bill Clinton and an embargo on books are the reasons your desk in Tydings Hall rocks on a short leg and is too small to hold a laptop.

How's it all fit together? Your desk is small and wobbly because it's old and broken. You're still using it because, as of last year, the university had a $620 million maintenance backlog. Yesterday, the state continued to hack away at our funding, cutting $25 million from the university system's cash reserves, about $10 million of which will come from this university. This does not bode well for the replacement of your desk.

The state is not cutting the university's budget because legislators hate learning and new desks. The governor has already cut $1.1 billion from the state's budget since the summer, and the state is facing a $2 billion deficit in the next fiscal year. The state government essentially has holes for pockets.

A recent study conducted by the Pew Center reports that, for the first time in history, more than one in 100 American adults is incarcerated. And, on average, it costs $23,876 to imprison someone — a rather expensive proposition for the state. To put that in context, for every dollar the state spends on higher education, it spends 74 cents on corrections.

The justice system is referred to as a "revolving door" for a reason — a 2002 study found that two of every three inmates are arrested again for serious crimes within three years of being released. But here's some exciting news: Offering higher education to prisoners might help fix the problem. Bard College operates a prison education initiative, and they report reducing reincarceration rates from 60 percent to less than 15 percent. They nearly halve the odds that an ex-prisoner will go back to jail.

If you think this is the part where I say we should do that — and save the state money and new desks, hooray — you're wrong. Before 1995, there were about 350 college-degree programs in prison, but there were fewer than 20 as of 2007. In 1994 Congress passed a law eliminating Pell grants for state and federal prisoners. That means only programs with access to outside funding, like those run by Bard and Wesleyan universities, can continue.

Too bad good policy doesn't mean popular policy. Health care reform has the country howling about "death panels." If President Barack Obama came out for reinstituting Pell grants for prisoners, we'd probably be hearing about how we have a coke-blowing ex-convict raised in a Kenyan jail for president. Still, this is the kind of creative thinking we need. At this point, it's either outside the box or deeper in the hole.

Mardy Shualy is a senior government and politics major. He can be reached at mshualy at umdbk dot com.