Prisons and Medicaid and, oh yes, global war

What’s wrong with this picture?

Prison Spending Outpaces All but Medicaid:

Criminal correction spending is outpacing budget growth in education, transportation and public assistance, based on state and federal data. Only Medicaid spending grew faster than state corrections spending, which quadrupled in the past two decades, according to the report Monday by the Pew Center on the States, the first breakdown of spending in confinement and supervision in the past seven years.

The increases in the number of people in some form of correctional control occurred as crime rates declined by about 25 percent in the past two decades.

As states face huge budget shortfalls, prisons, which hold 1.5 million adults, are driving the spending increases.

What in the world kind of country have we become?

Is this the Reagan revolution?

If so, then certainly it’s well past time for Mr. Obama’s change.

This is wrong, too, a great wrong is being done here:

One in 11 African-Americans, or 9.2 percent, are under correctional control, compared with one in 27 Latinos (3.7 percent) and one in 45 whites (2.2 percent). Only one out of 89 women is behind bars or monitored, compared with one out of 18 men.

So are we saying that nearly 10% of our young African-American men are criminals? If that is so, then the fault must be ours.

The picture I see here is one where too many people are poor (Medicaid spending) and too many other people make a living incarcerating the poor.

Mr. Greenwood said prisons and jails, along with their powerful prison guard unions, service contracts, and high-profile sheriffs and police chiefs, were in a much better position to protect their interests than were parole and probation officers.

�Traditionally, probation and parole is at the bottom of the totem pole,� he said. �They�re just happy every time they don�t lose a third of their budget.�

And we have thrown and are throwing trillions of dollars into the money hole of Iraq and Afghanistan.