Tuition increases and criminal justice

The MN Speaker of the House stopped by a year or two ago. I gave him a piece of my mind concerning post secondary education, as its getting shorted and yet funding for criminal justice grow and grows.

In the last 20 years, state funding for post secondary education has dropped as a percentage of the state budget multifold. In a neighboring state, its dropped by 41%. Yet our taxes keep going up and up and up.

Criminal Justice, eg courts, jails, and who knows who’s personal pockets change has increased multifold. It appears we put higher value on paying judges and lawyers than we do on educating our young. Something is dead wrong here.

Most of the time legal public servant wages are below pay scale. Thats as it should be, perhaps they should be even lower in the power positions, eg judges and attorneys. They take on those jobs, as a friend who took on a clerkship at the US supreme court explained to me for power and networking, not to make money. The same thoughts were echoed by a district attorney friend years ago. I wonder if perhaps they should be paid a grad student stipends instead of a wage, as the non-cash portion of the position is much more valueable.

Jails are another idiotic trend. We keep building more and more of them all the time. Are we as a society that more violent than the 50′s? I really doubt it. Do we have idiotic laws that make the regular joe a criminal, probably.

The speaker of the house explained it to me as protecting the citizens. Sure, no one wants a murderer or rapist running at large. Otoh, putting someone in jail for failure to have car insurance, writing a bad check, or drug possession makes little sense. Such folks do not cause huge damage to the public at large for their act, but they do cause huge damage by the costs incurred to incarcerate them.

If we reduce the funding for jails, change the compensation system to a state school grad student stipend for those in judicial and legal positions and fund education, we can once again return to a state of knowledge and education. I don’t think the judicial system would suffer much at all, there would be rapid turnover, career positions as judges and public attorneys would end, and we would no longer have productive citizens sitting in jail costing money.

However, so much of the political world revolves around the legal profession, such a concept would never happen. It would be counterproductive to the good old boys network.

The cool part is the MN judicial system was crying uncle to the governor as they got passed over in the budget process. They desparetly wanted a special session to fund it. It looks like it failed, yahoo!!! The judicial system should be under even more stringent budget cutting than the education system. In secondary ed, its not that uncommon for teachers to have a yearly take home pay decrease. I think the judicial system should have their cut as well, ideally to the level of a grad student stipend, but even 4% would be good.

What I’m afraid of, is that the idiots will shift the cuts away from their good old boy network, and pass it on to law enforcement. Thats shifting from preventative to reactionary, or as an MD friend calls it fix-me medicine. If you want to control crime, prevent it. Police presence makes a world of difference. One can hire a number of public service officers for much less than the cost of a judge. It may be possible even to hire 2 policemen for less than a judge, even if you look at the fully burdened expenses.

However, the police have little pull. They get their chain yanked around by the incompetants. Its too bad that we favor reactive rather than preventative measures. The positive outcome of the increases in anti-terrorism funding is more emphasis on law enforcement, not the judicial sections. It is a winning solution imho.