Massachusetts Lawyer Blog

Currently, I’m in the process of reviewing Weymouth’s annual budget (around 150 million dollars). The proposed budget would eliminate over twenty positions from the school department’s budget, never mind police and other town services that are being impacted in these tough fiscal times.

David W. White Jr., President of the Massachusetts Bar Association asks,

And what is it about our priorities that has us spending more on incarceration than higher education? In Massachusetts, we have over 25,000 inmates serving time in county jails or state prisons. Governor Deval Patrick's proposed 2009 budget seeks $1.4 billion for the sheriffs' departments and the Department of Correction. This money is primarily for incarceration. The same budget proposes $963 million for higher education.

This isn't an attack on the Governor as the problem certainly isn’t a Massachusetts only problem, Steven Ballard author of the Massachusetts Divorce & Family Law Blog, introduces in a recent post,

The New York Times yesterday published a good basic primer on a most embarrassing type of American Exceptionalism, i.e., America as Incarceration Nation

White should be commended for discussing solutions, even politcally unpopular ones. He offers several in, Fixing our criminal sentencing system,

Maybe it’s time we realize being tough, not wise, on crime, is being tough on schools and education. A 2007 Boston Globe Editorial made its case,

THE ROUGHLY $45,000 spent to lock up a prisoner in Massachusetts for a year is money well spent when it provides social defense against violent offenders who destroy families and destabilize neighborhoods. But such an expense starts to look suspect in cases involving nonviolent drug offenders, especially when recidivism rates are running so high among prisoners who receive inadequate vocational or educational training.