Prison sentence should never be the answer for every crime
On Monday, Judge Jerry W. Baxter will begin sentencing hearings for 11 Atlanta educators found guilty of racketeering and other charges for their roles in a standardized test cheating scandal.
After the verdicts were read April 1, the 11 were handcuffed and hauled off to jail.
The convicted educators, including a principal and five teachers, were among 34 charged in 2013 with altering test scores that improved the reputations of troubled schools and earned employees bonuses. One person was acquitted, and the other 22 arranged plea deals. That funding for schools is so dependent on higher test scores may have motivated this crime, but that’s a topic for another editorial on another day.
What these teachers and administrators did was reprehensible, but imprisoning them at taxpayers’ expense is the wrong kind of punishment. We should not be surprised, however, for in the United States incarceration seems to be the solution to every problem. That’s why the United States in No. 1 in the world for the percentage of its citizens behind bars.
The careers of these educators were ruined years ago when the investigation into the cheating scandal began. Punishment beyond career loss is certainly appropriate, but their treatment by Judge Baxter is not. They pose no threat to society; they are not drug dealers or ax murderers. It’s not as if they would start altering test scores as soon as they were let out on bail.
We might save money and improve society at the same time by finding more creative ways to punish nonviolent convicts.
As of 2012, the cost of incarcerating a person in Georgia was $21,039 per year, according to the Vera Institute of Justice. That state spends $1.13 billion a year on its prisons. Why lock up these educators at that cost when they might be compelled to perform tasks for public good? Ordering them to litter patrols might be a benefit to society, but a better use of their education and talents might be to assign them minimum-wage jobs as tutors for illiterate inmates, for example.
Prison shouldn’t be the punishment for many crimes in Pennsylvania, either. Our costs per year per inmate: $42,339.