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I have heard often that the US as a whole or States in it "spend more on prisons than on schools". This is apparently true for higher education, but I am interested in schools as in public education (guaranteed through age 16 in the US).

Links:
* CNN Graphic covering 40 US states

Oddthinking
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    Huffington Post is not authoritative enough for you? I was just trying to find examples of the statement, not to support it. I leave that to you-all. –  Mar 22 '16 at 23:52
  • Nothing to do with "authoritative". The article never made the claim. (Still going through the other articles) – Oddthinking Mar 22 '16 at 23:53
  • Christian Science Monitor is also a non-starter? In a minute you will kill the question as unsupported. I am supposed to provide references, and you are removing them. Why not simply close the question from the get-go? –  Mar 22 '16 at 23:54
  • If the rate is rising way faster, it does not take long for the spending to outstrip the reference level (education). –  Mar 22 '16 at 23:55
  • Because it took me time to read the articles and see if they made the claim. We are looking for notable claims, not just personal speculations, so I was looking for where the articles made the claim. The CNN Graphic effectively makes it for 40 states (although it raises the issue of what further evidence would it take to convince you - do you doubt the claim made by CNN?) – Oddthinking Mar 22 '16 at 23:57
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    I simply want to know if it is true or not. I wish there was a site to get the answer as to what to do about it. –  Mar 22 '16 at 23:58
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    I understand, but the scope of this site is to address important claims that many people believe, not just individual speculations. (I have lots of questions I wish people would research for me for free, but the answerers here are motivated by correcting common misapprehensions/lies, not just researching any question at all.) – Oddthinking Mar 23 '16 at 00:00
  • Oh. OK. Well I guess that my question is not likely to be a misapprehension. It should be closed on that basis, right? –  Mar 23 '16 at 00:02
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    The CNN graphic is "cost per student" for education, and "cost per inmate" for prisons. It is not "total spent on education" nor "total spent on prisons". – GEdgar Mar 23 '16 at 00:52
  • @GEdgar Apparently it is easier to cut a question to pieces than to simply answer it. I give up at trying to play "pin the tail on the donkey" on these sites. –  Mar 23 '16 at 00:54
  • @nocomprende If you can't find a specific claim and the question gets closed as Off-topic here, the question might still be on-topic on [Politics.SE]. In that case, you can flag the question for migration. But we'd need to check with Politics.SE first to see if it's welcome there. – gerrit Mar 23 '16 at 13:05
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    @nocomprende You just want to answer it? You could do what I just did, having no prior knowledge of the size of either of these items in the US budget: *google them*. *America spends over **$550 billion a year on public elementary and secondary education** in the United States* [Atlas]. // *In 2007, around **$74 billion was spent on corrections** according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.* [Wikipedia]. So the US spends an *order of magnitude* more on education than corrections. Satisfied? – Dan Bron Mar 23 '16 at 13:11
  • Do you have an example of a claim that the total prison budget is greater than the total school budget? – DJClayworth Mar 23 '16 at 16:14
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    @DanBron - make that into an answer? – user5341 Mar 29 '16 at 16:44
  • @DanBron Apparently the figure of merit is per-person. Perhaps it would be better to move the schools and the school children in to prison (that is what they call it anyway) and achieve some cost-savings there? Many of the children would get better food and housing. –  Apr 01 '16 at 17:15
  • @nocomprende It's probably more like per person-hour, and given kids are in public school for 13 years max, 8 hours a day max, are given one meal a day max, no school-sponsored healthcare, etc, I imagine the market rate for a child's life vastly outperforms that of a convict? But no matter, this is all just sensationalism. Clemens captured this kind of BS absolutely pithily in the 19th century: there's lies, damn lies, and statistics. – Dan Bron Apr 01 '16 at 17:21
  • @DanBron Ahh, Clemens, a Skeptic who didn't let schooling interfere with his education. I wonder what he thought of prisons. –  Apr 01 '16 at 17:27

2 Answers2

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Take a look here and you'll find:

The FY 2014 Budget requests a total of $8.5 billion for federal prisons and detention

Note that this only is the federal budget. According to this page, the total expenditure for prisons is 39 billion USD annually.

Over here you'll find that:

The federal government allocated approximately $154 billion on education in fiscal year 2015.

The answer should be pretty definitive because the annual federal budget for education is way higher than the United State's total annual expenditure for prisons.

Conclusion: The US does not spend more on prisons than on public education.

UTF-8
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    The United States is not just the federal government. Much of this is handled at state, county and city level. So you need to add up those numbers too. – Paul Johnson Apr 11 '16 at 16:48
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    @PaulJohnson In fact, I was just looking at the original article over at CNN and it specifically calls out that it's data is based on State Level expenditures and not Federal Level dollars. – Mark Apr 11 '16 at 16:49
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    When determining state budgets you have to decide what all to include. Prisons themselves are only a fraction of the total "correctional" costs. A few government and non-gov resources I found suggest total costs <$50bil. http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/scefy8210.pdf http://www.vera.org/sites/default/files/resources/downloads/price-of-prisons-updated-version-021914.pdf – gesell Apr 11 '16 at 17:42
  • @PaulJohnson Thank you. I took this into account. – UTF-8 Apr 11 '16 at 20:46
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Whenever you see this claim, read the details. They usually make one of two claims: Prisons costs more per person, or it costs more than higher education. Both are true, but it often gets misinterpreted as spending more overall on prisons. The reality is that every state spends way more on education than on prisons. It's not even close. Look at any state's annual budget. Most of the money for schools and prisons comes from state and local spending, but you can make the same claim for federal spending, too. True, there are a lot of prisoners in this country, but there are lot more children in schools. This article explains it well (It's specific to California, but it's pretty much the same situation for every state):

Political Road Map: What does the state spend more money on, prisons or schools?

Daniel Mulvihill
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