California needs to fund public education and social services, not prisons

11-16-2011

Opinion by By Amy Vanderwarker and Matt Haney/California Progress Report

Last Wednesday night, more than one thousand students and campus workers at University of California Berkeley held a day of action protesting budget cuts and fee increases to build momentum toward a state-wide demonstration at the UC Regents meeting on November 17th. Like other Occupy movements around the country, the crowd was cleared with police violence and mass arrests. The irony was not lost on one professor, who noted that the sharp rise in student debt has occurred during a period where prison funding has consistently been prioritized over funding for higher education. Indeed, California is now a leader on two counts that don’t make any resident proud: we have the largest prison population in the country, and our public universities have hiked tuition the most of any state in the country, 21% in the past year alone.[1] We now spend nearly equivalent amounts of money on locking people in cages as we do providing opportunities for higher education – 10.5 % of total state spending versus 12.7 %.[2] (more...)

Personal tools

Sections

California needs to fund public education and social services, not prisons

Document Actions