Tag Archives: Education

Results of lack of education

Juarez, Mexico, is farther down the road of emphasizing law and order over education and jobs, as Melissa del Bosque reports in the Texas Observer abo ut Mexico’s Lost Generations:
When Juarez’s (soon to be outgoing) Mayor Jose Reyes-Ferriz visited Austin last April something he said stuck with me.

He told the audience that a failure to invest in schools and other public infrastructure had led to the lawlessness in his city. Instead of schools and daycare centers, city leadership only invested in maquila parks and roads. Children were left on the streets to fend for themselves as their parents worked in the maquila factories for meager wages.

Mexican president Calderon, previously consumed by the drug war, finally noticed and did something:
“More than 5,000 residents have received job-training grants or temporary work sprucing up parks and sidewalks and planting trees. Officials added thousands of families to a government insurance program and handed out 6,000 scholarships in a city where few students were receiving such help.”

“It’s not enough to analyze it only in terms of public safety. You have serious gaps in the social and economic [areas] that have to be closed,” said Antonio Vivanco, a Calderon advisor overseeing the development effort.

Todos somos Juarez (We Are All Juarez).

-jsq

Nix on biomass plant in Traverse City, Michigan

Looking farther afield in Cadillac, Michigan than schools and realtors, there are some people who aren’t completely pleased with the local biomass plant:
Complaints are more frequent along Mary Street, a short stretch a few hundred yards south of the plant. Residents there deal with more intense noise and odors.

Craig Walworth’s home is among the closest to the plant. He walked up to his Jeep — a vehicle he cleaned the day before — and dragged his finger through a layer of film on the hood.

“Every morning, you have that to look forward to,” he said. “I clean my screens three times a year during the summer because they clog up.”

Nonetheless he didn’t say it affected his property values. However, that’s not the only issue.

Meanwhile, about an hour north on the edge of Lake Michigan, in Traverse City local activism caused cancellation of a proposed biomass plant: Continue reading →

Cost of Incarceration in Georgia

Carrie Teegardin and Bill Rankin
write in the AJC about A billion-dollar burden or justice? AJC investigation: Georgia leads nation in criminal punishment:
Georgia taxpayers spend $1 billion a year locking up so many criminal offenders that the state has the fourth-highest incarceration rate in the nation. When it comes to overall criminal punishment, no state outdoes Georgia.
They note that scare tactics made that happen.
But today, many public figures with strong anti-crime credentials are asking if that expenditure is smart, or even if it’s making Georgians safer. The debate about crime and punishment, once clearly divided along party lines, is now a debate in which conservatives often lead the charge for change.
Continue reading →

Prison population decline due to recession

FacingSouth reports on TURNING THE LOCK-EM-UP TIDE: State prison populations decline for first time since 1972:
Locking people up in jails and prisons is expensive. State officials know this all too well: In a country that puts more people behind bars than any other — the U.S. has less than 5% of the world’s population, but 25% of its prisoners — over 91% of the incarcerated are under state or local supervision.

The lock-’em-up approach to criminal justice that took off in the 1980s and ’90s may have helped a few political careers, but it has crushed state budgets: By 2008, states were spending over $50 billion a year on incarceration.

What else can you do?

But as Facing South has been reporting (see here and here), the Great Recession helped change that, pushing states to explore less expensive (and often more effective) options like alternative sentences for non-violent offenders and streamlining probation and parole.

Today, the Pew Center has released a report showing the shift in approach is bearing fruit: For the first time in 38 years, state prison populations are in decline.

Georgia, on the other hand, increased its prison population by 1.6%. Maybe instead of making massive cuts in education, Georgia could do something about the prison problem.

Literacy and Prisons

There’s a widespread factoid claiming that multiple states (maybe California, Arizona, Indiana, or Virginia) decide how many prison cells to build according to second or third grade reading levels. This is an urban legend, debunked by Washington Post, DailyKos, and numerous other investigators. Lots of people have requoted this factoid, from Colin Powell to Hillary Clinton, but they were misled.

However, there is substantial evidence that low educational performance does increase likelihood of incarceration. Furthermore, parental involvement won’t be enough to deal with this, since low-education prisoners tend to have low-education parents. Hillary was right: it does take a village.

Prison Literacy

In 1994 far more prisoners had reading difficulties than did the general public: Continue reading →

What’s a Green Job?

Green money is pouring into Austin, Texas, which now has to decide how to spend it. Sandra Zaragoza, writing in Portfolio.com, looks into what to do with it:
Last week, American Youthworks, a nonprofit aimed at at-risk youth, received $1.4 million in federal funds to build a green charter high school that will prepare students for jobs in solar-panel installation, green facilities management, and other jobs.

In the last few years, Austin Community College received $99,031 from Workforce Solutions for solar and weatherization training and, more recently, $59,800 from the Department of Labor to increase the number of women in green job training programs.

And ACC is hoping to bring more funding to Central Texas in federal grants. ACC is part of a group of Texas community colleges that have applied for $3.5 million in funding to build solar-energy training programs.

Education, solar, weatherization; who could argue with those things?

But do those functions create new jobs? Continue reading →