By Tam Ma and Oiyan Poon

Myopia has infected the Governor’s office, and once again, Governor Schwarzenegger has shown that he is full of catchy one-liners and little meaningful substance.  In his final State of the State speech, the Governor exclaimed that California should not be the kind of state that spends “more on prison uniforms than caps and gowns.” He proposed a constitutional amendment to shift money from prisons to public colleges and universities and guarantee that at least 10% of the state budget be allocated to UC’s and CSU’s and limit state prison spending to no more than 7% of the budget.  Sounds really great, right!?

As long-time advocates of social justice, we half expected the Governor to end his speech by throwing a fist into the air and shouting “Books, Not Bars!” We found several troubling concerns when we looked more closely at the Governor’s proposal:

1. The proposal will add to California’s fundamental state budget problems, which will further exacerbate its fiscal challenges and leave the most vulnerable to suffer more.

2. It might serve as a big money windfall for corporate-owned prisons.

3. It does little to address the increasing college access gap for low-income communities and people of color.

State Budget Problems are Not Solved

While the Governor’s proposal directly appeals to decades of progressive criticism that the state spends more money on prisons than it does on higher education, it falls short of actually ensuring that UC’s and CSU’s receive adequate, predictable support from the state. 

Such a funding guarantee can be suspended by the Governor and the Legislature during tough budget times (which, in California, is every year).  Just last year, the Governor himself proposed to take $3 billion away from K-12 schools and community colleges when he proposed to suspend Proposition 98, the minimum funding law designed to provide funding protections for these schools.  We should also note that Prop. 98 was suspended in 2004 and schools were never repaid the money that was taken from them that year.

The Governor’s proposal ties funding for higher education to the state’s economic conditions: as state general fund revenues dwindle, as they have in recent years, higher education funding would go down with it.

Finally, the Governor’s proposal imposes yet another funding formula that only serves to further complicate the state's broken budget process.  When most of the state budget is tied up with funding formulas, Legislators and the Governor have little maneuvering room to craft a state budget that reflects our state’s needs and priorities.  As a result, as we have seen year after year, critical safety net programs are targeted for deep cuts or total elimination.  Last year’s state budget, among other things, eliminated funding for domestic violence shelters, suspended a breast cancer screening program for poor and uninsured women, kicked tens of thousands of middle-class children off of Healthy Families and forced the state’s poorest residents to live on less as the state continues to have a double-digit unemployment rate. Stability for higher education funding should not be achieved on the backs of women and children in need.

Big Windfall for Wall Street

It sure sounded awesome when Schwarzenegger said, “So I will submit to you a constitutional amendment so that never again do we spend a greater percentage of our money on prisons than on higher education.” But his proclamation was immediately followed by this statement:

And the way we get this done is to find more cost-effective ways to run our prison system and allows private prisons to compete with public prisons.

 

Say what?!  Look, we’re both UC grad students feeling the pain of the increased fees and state budget crisis, but we’re also not hot on the potential boon to the prison industrial complex, which has been called a “new form of slavery” by some.

Enacting real state budget reform is the only way to address the chronic under-funding of public education and other vital social programs in the state.

Proposal doesn’t address College Access Gaps

With continued budget problems significantly driving economically vulnerable populations into further poverty, education will become an increasingly out of reach goal for many, especially low-income communities that are more likely to be targeted by the criminal justice system for incarceration.




Doesn’t the establishment of for-profit prisons in California mean there’s more incentive for corporations to increase the already huge numbers of Californians in jail?  As we know, there are disproportionately large numbers of Pacific Islander, Southeast Asian American, African American and Latino men sent to jail; and unfortunately very low numbers going to college. Privatizing prisons instead of re-examining the criminal justice policies that emphasize punishment over rehabilitation, especially for non-violent crimes, will limit the opportunities available to men of color.

The Governor’s proposal will in effect prioritize the youth to jail pipeline over the K-12 to college pipeline.

 




It puzzles us then, that UC President Mark Yudof declared Schwarzenneger’s proposal to be a “bold and visionary plan that represents a fundamental restoration of the values and priorities that have made California great.”  Perhaps Yudof is suffering from a bit of myopia himself. CSU Chancellor Charles B. Reed had a more muted response, stating that the Governor’s administration “deserves credit for proposing this idea” and that CSU looks forward “to working closely with them on the details as it progresses.” 

Let’s hope the Governor’s proposal gathers dust on a shelf while real budget reform and policy change to address real college access is enacted.

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Tam Ma is a 2nd-year law student at Berkeley Law School frantically applying to scholarships and signing up for more student loans to cover recent fee increases.  Oiyan Poon is a 5^th year Ph.D. Candidate in Education at UCLA, who is not enrolled this quarter because she couldn’t afford the fee increase.