It amazes me that we are willing to put millions into building more prisons but balk at putting a few thousand into programs that lessen the need for those prisons. Perhaps it’s because prisons are built for a concrete population. Putting money into helping foster kids make better choices as adults is more nebulous. We can’t know how many of them will make good choices and not end up in our penal system.
That doesn’t mean, though, that we shouldn’t give them the best chance possible. If we don’t want to do it because it is the right thing to do, we should do it because every kid that ends up in jail costs us more in the first two years of jail than it would cost to give him or her a fair start in life.
In Alaska, we spend an average of $44,000 per prisoner per year. Ten prisoners will cost us $450,000 in one year. For the $55,000 proposed in this year’s state budget, the University of Alaska can offer 10 more tuition scholarships to kids who have few other options. For every one of those kids who find a way to make it in life, we recoup that investment if they stay out of jail just one year. And we get the added benefit of another productive member of society who will not spend the rest of his or her life depending on it for handouts.
I can already imagine my legion of online “fans” readying their comments to this concept. They’ll explain how they were abandoned on the side of the road when they were 5 and managed to pull through and become productive adults using only their wits and the dirty diaper they had on when their parents dumped them. They didn’t need no stinking government handout.
To all these lovely and amazing people I can only say, “Well, good for you.”
But not everyone is a superhero like these “fans” who seem to think that any government program costing money not going directly into their pockets is a bad program. Ergo, Medicare good – Medicaid bad.
My feeling that the world would be a better place if we all exercised a little more compassion and a little less judgment towards those less fortunate invariably leads me to being called the worse epithet many people can possibly imagine. I am… pause for gasps of horror… a liberal. In fact, I simply believe that our society will only thrive if we make every effort to bring even the least of our brethren along on our national journey towards peace and prosperity.
George Santayana said, “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Well, I’d just as soon not repeat the French Revolution. You might remember that all those peasants told to eat cake if they couldn’t get bread decided to relieve those with both cake and bread of their heads.
Nasty things happen when a society decides that if you are one of the “haves”, it’s because god made you are superior to the “have-nots”.
The legislature this year passed a lot of small tweaks to our child care system to help foster kids make it to a good place despite the fact that they got a raw deal to start life. Nothing that will break the bank like the cost of the gabillion dollar capital budget that, because it was passed by “conservatives” and not “liberals”, is considered a wise expenditure of government dollars to stimulate the economy. No, the money being requested to help kids get from foster care to independent living without ending up in jail or homeless on the streets wouldn’t be enough to pay for a feasibility study for the smallest capital project proposed.
But it will be a start towards creating the opportunities these kids need coming out of foster care to meet their potential to become productive, contributing members of our society.
Or, we can continue to take a perverse pride in the fact that a 2009 study by the King’s College London International Centre for Prison Studies found that in the U.S., 756 people out of every 100,000 is incarcerated, making us number one in the world for putting our citizens in jail.
I’d rather be number one for something else.