Reading is fundamental to not being incarcerated

No man left behind unless it's third grade and he can't read so well. In that case we train him in the janitorial arts. 3rd graders are too stupid to read or don't care? THIRD GRADERS? Really? Holy...

In fall 2015, about 50.1 million students will attend public elementary and secondary schools. Of these, 35.2 million will be in prekindergarten through grade 8 and 14.9 million will be in grades 9 through 12. An additional 4.9 million students are expected to attend private schools

The United States is the world's leader in incarceration with 2.2 million people currently in the nation's prisons or jails -- a 500% increase over the past thirty years.

According to you we spend 3.5 times more on education but we have over 20 times the number of kids in school as we do people in prison.

Maybe we should work to identify kids who are struggling early and give them the resources to catch up rather than giving up on them in elementary school. Novel idea I know. Your suggestion is something I'd expect to see in China.

You for whatever reason have this real detachment where you don't have the B in the A to C equation. You believe people who are incarcerated aren't virtuous enough and are unable to see the correlation between the quality of a school and neighborhood and the caliber of students that are produced there. According to your logic it's incredible the amount of stupid kids who don't care that live in poor neighborhoods and go to bad schools.

 

Woah, what? Source for your 3.5 times more for education than crime please?

 

A lot of so-called medical "science" isn't really science at all if they're not as rigorous as what I am positing, but rather just individuals trying to pull out data in support of a certain position in order to convince people to believe what they want people to believe.

That doesn't sound too hard to do.

And that merits throwing our money away and away from spending it on other endeavors that may be more causal with crime rates than reading is?

Yeah, that I don't like wasting people's money rather than using it in ways that are more likely to lower crime rates.

 

Have you ever noticed when a politician talks about cutting expenditures, not one has ever mentioned cutting incarceration? It's of course because of private prisons.

But yeah, not buying the 3.5 times more thing. In the last 20 years, California has built 20 something new jails/prisons and 1 university. You wouldn't build a hotel in NYC if you didn't expect it to be full. Same thing with jails.

 

he link between a poor education and incarcaration is borne out in data. Dropouts are 3.5 times more likely to be arrested than high school graduates. Nationally, 68 percent of all males in prison do not have a high school diploma. Only 20 percent of California inmates demonstrate a basic level of literacy, and the average offender reads at an eighth grade level.

Many so-called dropouts who end up in jail are actually push-outs. Under the guise of zero tolerance, initiated after Columbine, students are often asked to leave school as a first response rather than a last resort. Discriminatory practices are common.

In 2011-2012, black youth represented 16 percent of the juvenile population, but 34 percent of the students expelled from U.S. schools. Black students are three times more likely than whites to be suspended. The majority of teens in the juvenile justice system engaged in non-violent crimes such as truancy or disruptive behavior.

Says Deveare Smith, "Kids [are] being yanked out of school for what would be called mischief in wealthy communities and sent to jail."

For most youth, jail is the beginning of the end of any hope for a productive life. An estimated two-thirds to three-fourths of incarcerated teens ultimately withdraw or drop out of high school.

Our failure to invest in education is costly for individuals and taxpayers.

According to Scott Graves of the California Budget Project, California is expected to spend more than $62,000 on each prison inmate in 2014-15--almost 7 times the $9,200 it will spend for each K-12 student. Over the past two decades, California spending per prisoner has increased nearly three times faster than spending per K-12 student.

Although California is up from 49th place to 37th in school spending, it receives a D+ for school financing in Education Week's 2014 Quality Counts report card.

Why pay almost seven times the amount for juvenile detention as we do to educate our youth? We know what it takes to educate students well, and the cost is substantially lower than the cost of prison.

https://ed.stanford.edu/in-the-media/schools-v-prisons-educations-way-cut-prison-population-op-ed-deborah-stipek

 

Just taking your numbers
919 billion on Education
261 billion on crime

School age kids in 2010 - 40.1 million
Prisoners - 1.6 million
Does that 261 million include - Police, Judges, Fed Offices, support staff etc? etc?

I wonder if those number come close to 40 million

919/40.1 = ~23000/kid
261/1.6 = ~ 163000/prisonerAndOrCriminal

Rocket River

 

Childhood reading is rampant and needs to stop.

 

For say we the land of the FREE
We incarcerate more than almost everyone on the planet

We have to admit .. . we have a NEED for criminals and crime
it is almost a fundamental part of our culture and economy

Admit it . . .. Incarceration is an economic financial market that cannot be extinquished for fear of loss of jobs, income, the overall national economy


Rocket River

 

It's no child left behind, no man left behind is a military thing. I was never a fan of the program. As a George W. Bush program, I am surprised that you would support it.

I, like most of the people I know, could read before beginning any level of formal schooling. If you can't read by third grade, it is probably not the school that is stopping you. If you can't read by twelfth grade, should you really be handed a diploma?

Since it is not a comparison of corrections to school, but the entirety of policing to school, the numbers you are using for comparison are meaningless. There are 50.1 million children in school, but there are 350 million people whose neighborhoods are policed. So what? The question in the OP is should we put the same effort into education as we do into policing. Using the only objective measure I have seen posted thus far, we put more effort into education.

We have tried that. Have you ever heard of programs like Head Start. Those gains are lost by the time the kid reaches twelfth grade, because they don't just need a hand at the beginning. Children struggling at the beginning are going to be struggling the whole time, because their problems are not that they didn't have the same minimal educational foundation, it is that they are not personally as well equipped to handle education.

Not only would diverting those who are stupid or apathetic be beneficial to them, pulling them from a path of failure and humiliation and into something they would be better able to handle, it would be hugely beneficial to those who are not diverted, as class time no longer has to be devoted to the most remedial of studies and the discipline problems associated with those who are acting out because they can't do the work.

I don't agree with your excuses of why people fail. Maybe it comes from succeeding in the face of obstacles and seeing it done by others. Maybe it comes from recognizing that those times I have failed, it was not as a result of systems arrayed against me, but as a result of my own personal failings. I have seen very few people incarcerated that did not make a conscious choice to do something that ends them up in prison. I don't blame their school for that choice, no. There are thousands of other people that went to that same school that never robbed anybody. I don't blame their neighborhood, they have thousands of law abiding neighbors. The blame falls on the individual.

education spending: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/education_chart_20.html
"crime" spending: http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports/2014/05/10-crime-facts under "Fact 8"

 

Best economy in the nation (Texas of course) has been closing prisons because they cost too much.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-30275026

Why Texas is closing prisons in favour of rehab

...something happened in 2007, when Texas Republican Congressman Jerry Madden was appointed chairman of the House Corrections Committee with the now famous words by his party leader: "Don't build new prisons. They cost too much."

The impulse to what has become the Right on Crime initiative was fiscal conservatism - the strong sense that the taxpayer was paying way too much money to fight a losing war against drugs, mental ill-health and petty criminality.

...

Though fiscal conservatism may have got the ball rolling, what I saw in Texas - spending time in court and speaking to offenders, prison guards, non-profit staff and volunteers - goes way beyond the desire to save money.

The Prison Entrepreneurship Programme, for instance, matches prisoners with businesspeople and settles them in a residential community on release. Its guiding values are Christian and its staff's motives seem to be love and hope for their "brothers", who in turn support the next batch of prisoners leaving jail.

...

Far from having to build new jails for the 17,000 expected new inmates, Jerry Madden and his colleagues have succeeded in closing three prisons.

 

I do not support government intervention but I do support personal intervention. When I was in college, I went to the mall to buy my mother a card for Mother's Day. While shopping for a card, a young black man asked me to read a card to him saying he could not read. I gladly read a few cards to him until he picked one he liked. I felt very sorry for him. When I started to leave the mall, I felt the need to go find that young man and offer to teach him to read. Unfortunately, I could not find him. That has always bothered me. If it ever happens again I will definitely offer to teach someone to read. I have spent a lot of time in my life helping young Hispanic kids with various school assignments including helping some who were not good readers. The opportunity to help an adult has never happened to me again but if it does I will jump at the chance.

 

Mandatory schooling is a product of government intervention.

 

No arguments here. That some people can make it through government mandated schooling without being able to read is proof that there are issues with that system.

 

Agreed, public schooling isn't all the same. Shining attention on parents or children for not being responsible enough is a different matter to this. The issues are related, but one doesn't substitute for the other.

 

I don't know why you made (an attempt to make) reference to it. I am glad you agree that NCLB is not a good system. Now if only you would come around to the idea that it is not even conceptually good.

I think we as a society can do a better job of sorting people into the areas they would best fit. There is a need for people to be plumbers and garbage men, bus drivers and valets, janitors and gardeners. Not everyone is destined to become a teacher, a lawyer, a doctor, etc. Wasting resources and diminishing the education of others to try to get a future landscaper a high school diploma is suboptimal.

Actually, that was exactly the question from the OP, which you should know because you wrote it. "Should we put as much effort as we do in policing and fighting crime into fighting illiteracy at a young age?" Notice that you don't say anything about marginal dollars. The answer to this question is no. We should and do spend more on education.

We can't make people smarter, and we have no right or obligation to determine their priorities.

I disagree. If you test everyone at 8, you will probably have a pretty good idea of where they are going to end up educationally speaking (absent subsequent brain damage). I remember they used to give yearly standardized tests in California called the CTBS (California Test of Basic Skills, IIRC). Children's scores on that were largely static from year to year. The people in the 15th percentile stayed around there. The people in the 90th percentile stayed around there. Although it was much more a subject matter test than an IQ test, the subject matter nature of it was simple enough that it could probably reasonably proxy as an IQ test (much like the SAT back when it had only math and verbal). Because people's IQ doesn't tend to change, their performance on proxy IQ tests is not going to change.

I was read to as a child, then picked it up, then read on my own. No one can completely learn to read on their own, as reading is non-intuitive (despite what Edgar Rice Burroughs would have us believe). Having said that, there is sufficient instruction in reading in K-2 that a person of moderate intelligence and moderate motivation is going to be able to pick it up. Trying to get the people with below average intelligence and below average dedication through a high school education is a misallocation of time and money, IMO.

 

The poll is confusing.

We already are taking action.

 

One day it's don't play for the Bengals, the next it's literacy.

 

Yes I agree with this.

 

Are you saying it's fine if janitors and gardeners can't read?

AND BTW, You should read the Brave New world. Because what you are describing is almost like that. A dystopia.