Texas spending on prisons and jails is the highest in the nation, a new federal study concludes, and has grown about five times faster than the state's rate of spending growth on elementary and secondary education over the past three decades. But the state still spends significantly more on its schools than its prisons.
A new analysis of federal data released last week by the U.S. Department of Education found that Texas corrections spending increased by 850 percent between 1989 and 2013, while the rate of funding for pre-kindergarten to grade 12 education grew by 182 percent. In the 1979-80 fiscal year, for example, Texas spent $14 billion on education and almost $604 million on corrections. In 2013, it spent about $41 billion on schools and $5 billion on incarceration (in constant 2013 dollars).
On average, growth in spending on prisons and jails in other states tripled the rate of growth in funding for public K-12 education over the same period, the report found.
The wide disparity in Texas is caused by the state’s harsh sentencing laws and the strict enforcement of non-violent offenses, which have quadrupled its incarceration rate, the report asserted.
“Budgets reflect our values, and the trends revealed in this analysis are a reflection of our nation’s priorities that should be revisited,” said U.S. Secretary of Education John King Jr. in a statement. “For far too long, systems in this country have continued to perpetuate inequity. We need to invest more in prevention than in punishment, to invest more in schools, not prisons.”
