Spending on Higher Education for Texas Inmates Creates Budget Surplus

In the blog article "Texas Spends Millions on College for Prison Inmates" the author stipulates that education funding for the incarcerated should instead go to the un-incarcerated under the premise of relative deservedness, but there are serious flaws to merits of such a policy, primarily this is because cutting higher education for the incarcerated costs more in the overall budget than not cutting higher education for the incarcerated.

This can be easily demonstrated by breaking down the costs of higher education and its effects on recidivism rates versus continuing cost of incarceration:

The most conservative estimate found for the cost per year of the average incarcerated prisoner, $22,000 per year.

The average recidivism rate for ex-prisoner is about 52%.

“Studies suggest that prisoners who participate in higher education demonstrate much lower recidivism than those that do not. For example, one longitudinal analysis of 3,000 ex-offenders found that those who participated in prison education programs were 29 percent less likely to return to prison (Steurer, Smith, & Tracy, 2001).” 

Assuming that 29% of the 16,088 ex cons that haven't paid back $9.5 million would be back in prison without having participated in higher education, with the cost of 4665 inmates at $22,000 dollars a year, the incarceration costs alone would exceed the $9.5 million lost in unpaid loans in less than two months.

The Texas budget exists as complicated and interconnected piece of legislation. The effects of cuts need to analyzed within the larger framework to discern their overall effect. Providing higher education for Texas inmates comes at a surplus to the overall Texas budget, and should not be considered for budget cuts. For every dollar cut many from these programs, many more dollars must be spent baby-sitting the incarcerated, dollars wasted that could be spent benefiting society.

New Texas Anti-Abortion Legislation Infringes Upon Women's Rights While Paving the Way to the Next Crime Wave

 The Texas House Bill 82(R) HB 15 that Gov. Rick Perry declared an "emergency" legitimizes itself under the false premises that read:
 "SECTION 11. The purposes of this Act are to:

(1) protect the physical and psychological health and well-being of pregnant women;
(2) provide pregnant women access to information that would allow a pregnant woman to consider the impact an abortion would have on the pregnant woman's fetus; and
(3) protect the integrity and ethical standards of the medical profession."

But should read:

SECTION 11. The real purposes of this Act are to:

(1) Inflict further physical discomfort and psychological damage to women seeking to terminate unwanted pregnancies;
(2) force women with unwanted pregnancies to be subjected to a one-sided argument and implicit guilt trip that would allow a woman with the unwanted pregnancy to feel punished for considering the good of society and the value of her own life above the moralism of a segment of the population; And
(3) erode the integrity and ethical standards of the medical profession by bringing intrusive, unwanted and unadvised state enforced medical procedures into the sanctity of the doctor patient relationship.

If giving women access to information is of priority emergency status, then one should hope to these points be treated with equal importance and deliberation:

1. the dissemination of information like comprehensive sex education before and during puberty;
   
   
2. education on how to use birth control along with free access to it;
   
3. the reasons why a woman's right to choose whether or not to carry out a pregnancy is contingent on women achieving equal status in society.
   

Instead, state funding that was being spent on sex education is being siphoned to the abstinence programs that are proven to fail at reducing teen pregnancy; and women will be forcefully vaginally probed by the state if they are to be able to exercise their reproductive right to have an abortion.

It is expected that the tactics that would be enforced under this bill could be up to 80% effective in deterring women from carrying out abortions. It should well be known by lawmakers that the only policy proven to be effective in raising or lowering the crime rate for extended periods is whether or not women are able to terminate unwanted pregnancies. If this legislation is passed--and it is nothing shy of certainty that it will--there will be with equal certainty a spike in the crime rate in the next two decades. No debate has been made of the significance of this catastrophic effect and the damage to life and to society that will result because of this policy.

82(R) HB 15's only redeeming value is the political clout it lands its supporters. This bill should be struck down upon grounds of its hypocritical intent as well as its affront to women's rights and its impending negative consequence to society as a whole.