Meanwhile, per student spending for the Philadelphia School District lags well behind many districts in the surrounding suburbs.
Ram Cnaan, associate dean of the School of Social Policy and Practice at the University of Pennsylvania, calls education key to trying to reduce the numbers of people going to state prisons.
"One thing we know is that education works," Cnaan said. "You either educate people before, or you educate them while they are in prison."
Cnaan and others, including the NAACP, contend that tough antidrug and anticrime laws adopted in the last three decades have fueled prison growth.
The nation, he said, is spending "way too much on prisons, the biggest growing industry in our country."
Every year states plan to build more prisons, Cnaan said. "They have to meet court orders, they have no choice.
"It is our society that wants to feel safe and wants to feel correct by sending people to prison for long sentences for relatively minor crimes."
Cnaan described the United States as "the most incarcerating society in the history of the human race."
He said the result is that when inmates return to their communities, "it is almost impossible for them to reintegrate."
Benjamin Todd Jealous, president and CEO of the NAACP, said in a telephone interview last week, that the nation should look to New York and other states that over the last decade have reduced prison populations through specialty courts and diversion programs such as drug rehabilitation. Jealous said crime in New York dropped faster than in states "that tried to control crime problems by incarceration."
"The first thing states need to do is form a criminal justice commission that looks at all state laws from beginning to end . . . and ask this question: 'Does this work, and does this make us safer?' " Jealous said.
