Apples and oranges

In an essay in the Bangor Daily News of Nov. 18-19, professor Philip Trostel compared state spending on prison inmates with college students. I work at the prison and have kids in college. I appreciate the professor’s advocacy for better state funding for college students. However, I think his comparison here is all apples and oranges.

How does he come up with his per-prisoner spending numbers? He appears to lump jails with the state prison system, which confuses the picture. I have always thought our per-prisoner cost is about average for the U.S. – around $30,000 per year. Maine ties with Vermont as having the lowest total state prison population, under 200, compared with 34,000 state college students, and the lowest incarceration rate, one comparable to most other modern countries. The U.S. as a whole has a prison incarceration rate that is two to three times greater than any other country in the world, an odd figure for our bastion of freedom.

The citizens of Maine typically vote down efforts to improve the state prison system, yet want to lock up all the bad guys for as long as possible. Our jail-prison system is also under great pressure to better serve the mentally ill, who often end up incarcerated as a long-term byproduct of our failure to serve them in the community. Usually acting on emotions (and contrary to studies about what works), our citizens don’t like to take responsibility for offenders, like sex offenders, who come from our communities, in classic nimbyism. Note the recent failure of the Kennebec County effort to develop minimum security facilities to house the many prisoners who do not need expensive, higher-security lockups.

Slamming the Maine correctional system does not help professor Trostel make his case for better college funding.

James M. Thomas

Camden