slides: See the States That Spend More on Incarceration than Higher Education

Tuesday, January 05, 2016

Brendan Murray, GoLocalPDX Contributor

According to new data released near the end of 2015, Oregon is among the states with the lowest ratio of higher education spending to prison and incarceration spending. Criminal justice and higher education experts, advocates and reformers told GoLocal that, the state’s disparity in funding is a major issue that needs to be addressed.

According to a study entitled Public Research Universities: Changes in State Funding, published by the American Academy for Arts and Sciences, Oregon spends $204 million in higher education each year, only fifth from the bottom in the United States. Meanwhile, the state spends nearly four times that, $802 million in total, on corrections.

That gives them the second largest disparity in the country, trailing only Michigan and leading Arizona, Vermont and Colorado in the top five. According to the Academy, the lack of funding can have major impacts on the U.S. and state economy in the future.

“The number of students who take degrees in the humanities provides one of the most fundamental indicators of the state of the field,” the Academy said. “Large changes in the numbers of those who choose undergraduate humanities majors can affect the ecology of higher education, while an increase or decrease in the number of those completing advanced degrees in the humanities may signal tight job markets for new Ph.D.’s or warn of future shortages of teachers.”

In an interview with GoLocal, Shannon Wight, Vice President of the Partnership for Safety and Justice, said that recent actions taken by the State of Oregon to cut prison spending should be only the beginning.

“Prison funding should be reduced and Oregon has begun a thoughtful process of doing just that,” Wight said. “Oregon needs to build on the modest reforms we passed in 2013 and 2015 and identify more significant reforms to reduce the number of people under correctional control in our state.”