Politics / Society
It’s Cheaper to Educate Than Incarcerate
- All School Day panelists included Susan Burton, left, and Ramona Ripston.
- Photo/Brian Goodman
By Meaghan Hardy on February 11, 2010 7:52 AM
Susan Burton knows what it’s like to feel hopeless. After one of her children was shot and killed, she was in and out of prison six times on drug charges.
“When you leave prison,” she said, “you get off a bus in downtown L.A. with $200, no I.D., no social security card.”
With few resources available to her, Burton found it difficult to break out of the cycle.
“I got angry, and I told myself I was going to do something,” she said.
In 1996, Burton received the opportunity to go into a drug treatment facility. Two years later, she bought a house, invited other women in similar situations to live with her, and “A New Way of Life Reentry Project” was born.
Burton’s personal experience illustrated much of the conversation about policies related to prisoner reentry at the USC School of Social Work’s annual All School Day.
All School Day began in 1992 as a response to the Los Angeles riots. Its goal is to keep the school connected to issues in the surrounding community and the larger concept of social justice. This year’s event, held Feb. 4 at Bovard Auditorium, focused on the theme “Barriers to Reentry: Life After Prison.”
Los Angeles County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas, who serves the second district of which the University Park campus is part, delivered the keynote address. “This discussion of reentry is taking on more and more significance,” he said, referring to California’s decision to release 43,000 prisoners from its overcrowded jails.
Ridley-Thomas spoke of the need to shift resources and focus from the suppression method of dealing with crime.
“It has been a long, hard fight to get the topic of prevention and intervention on the table,” he said. “It is far more costly to incarcerate than to educate.”
Ridley-Thomas covered several policy areas in connection with the problem of recidivism, including mental health care, job training and education services, and drug treatment programs.
He was particularly vocal about the availability of mental health services in California schools, something he has championed in his public life. The supervisor said that 40 percent to 60 percent of health services sought at California public schools were mental health services. Seventeen percent of the children in juvenile hall suffer from mental illness, much higher than the general population rate, he added.
The discussion continued with a panel of four community leaders who work on issues of reentry, which was moderated by Cherry Short, assistant dean of global and community initiatives.
In addition to Burton, panelists included William Arroyo, medical director of the Child, Youth and Family Administration for the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health and clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at the Keck School of Medicine of USC; Michael Graff-Weisner, vice president of programs and government relations at Chrysalis, a nonprofit organization that helps economically disadvantaged and homeless individuals with job placement; and Ramona Ripston, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California.
The discussion repeatedly turned to the local and state budget crises and the potential impact on services related to prisoner reentry.
“Scarce resources are confronting us every day in every way in government, and we will be forced to make smarter decisions,” Ridley-Thomas said.
The panel agreed.
“It’s cheaper to treat [drug addicts] in the community than it is to keep them in prison. So, we hope they will make better, more informed decisions about how to spend our money,” Arroyo said.
Echoing the sentiment, Ripston added: “It costs more to keep someone in prison for a year than to send someone to Harvard for a year.”
Seemingly deterred by the talk of reentry barriers, one student asked for advice on dealing with the fatigue and frustration associated with fighting this issue.
“There’s struggle in change,” Burton replied. “If you set out, you have to be ready to struggle and get tired and revive and get back up and continue the struggle.”
TAGS: humanities
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