PRISON EXPENSES
E-Mail by Jon Marc Taylor, MA Bio/Address
Charles Hammer asked ("Poverty Wages?" March 28, 2001) why must University of Missouri Kansas City students pay tuition that is 50 percent higher than tuition at the University of Kansas? He might as well have asked why must state university students in Missouri pay the most excessive tuitions in the Big 12 Conference?
A long ignored significant reason for the Show-Me-State's costly college fees is its excessive and perpetual prison expansion policy. Over the past twenty-five years tuition at state public universities have increased 250 percent, with supportive state financing growing by only 150 percent. The difference had to be made up from somewhere, at the expense of someone. From 1991 to 1997, tuition at MU doubled from roughly $750 to $1500 a semester.
Concomitantly, Missouri proportionally incarcerates a larger number of citizens than any of its neighbors. To pay for this most costly and draconian criminal justice policy, comparing legislative budget priorities, it is glaringly obvious where the money for every more barbed wire camps has come from.
Over the past Fifteen years, spending on corrections has grown from 2.9 to 8 percent of the state's budget, while higher education's appropriation shrank by a corresponding amount from 18 to just 13.7 percent. In one recent budget the state invested a scant $12 million in university construction, as it spent over $166 million in building two more prisons and expanding others.
Mr. Hamner may be correct in labeling part-time instructors as "cash cows" for UMKC, but have no doubt that the state university system has been the dollar for dollar cash cows for the department of corrections. We have literally been on trading textbooks for cellblocks.
Jon Marc Taylor, AA, BS, MA, Ball State University-Indiana State Reformatory extension program.
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