Jails, Schools & Our Priorities

I learned this week that L. A. Unified is going to cut 507 staff and clerical positions and that costs have almost doubled in the construction budget for a new "Death Row." Okay, nothing remarkable so far. You have to keep up repairs on death row, which grows far faster than our ability to carry out the penalty. And sure, it's a good idea for L.A. Unified to cut staff and clerical positions and try to keep actual teachers in our deteriorating classrooms.

The payoff is in the fearful symmetry of the numbers. Our school budget has been shorted $400 million by the state. Meanwhile, our new and improved death row construction project has grown from $220 million to (you guessed it!) $400 million.

Just as we have to cut social programs but always have money for weapons systems, we have grown accustomed to the fact that while we short our kids' education, we always have money for them if they drop out and go to jail.

It is not that L.A. Unified spends our money well or couldn't do with losing a fair number in administration; it is that we always cut at the teaching level and have more than a billion dollars to spend on the transportation of students. When they do cut at the non-teaching level, it is almost always to move administrators around--and sometimes back into the classes--taking the places of people who actually want to be teaching students.

As for prettying up death row, we have to ask Why? Kids can be in dirty broken down schools with lead pipes carrying poisoned water to drinking fountains, but the people we plan on killing get newer and fresher surroundings? Doesn't appear, at first blush, like we have our priorities quite right.

In this election season we will be debating medical care and insurance. Liberals will argue that more care should be available and insurance companies should not tell doctors who shall live and who shall die. Conservatives will argue that government is incompetent and the private sector can do just fine. Okay, but can we all agree that the general public should be entitled to healthcare that--even if it does not equal what congress gets--is at least better than felons who are serving time get?

Meanwhile the court appointed receiver for the prisons is demanding $7 billion for mental health facilities and services for the incarcerated. If you need medical services, mental therapy or an organ transplant, either be very wealthy or steal something and go to jail. Don't be so careless as to be middle-class or poor. And yes, you can go to school in jail, earn a GED and even a college degree.

Someone is definitely crazy, and $7 billion might not cover it.