Background: Grassroots Leadership, a community-based advocacy group in North Carolina, has partnered with organizations across the country to prepare state case studies that contrast the amount of state funding dedicated to prisons with that provided for higher education in recent decades. These reports highlight the discrepancies between the amounts states spend per pupil and per inmate; between their appropriations for higher education and for corrections; and between attendance in colleges and universities and incarceration in prisons by African Americans. They raise alarming issues about our spending priorities, and in some states, they expose the detrimental effects of using for-profit corporations to build and operate prisons.

Fall 2004 Project: The Appalachian Institute will partner with Grassroots Leadership to produce Education v. Incarceration: A West Virginia Case Study. Juxtaposing higher education and prison spending and “use” provides a strong message about the importance assigned to higher education in the state for use by higher education organizations. The study will be released at a fall conference on prison issues, tentatively scheduled for November 2004. The Institute will then work with other faith-based organizations, prison ministries, and other social justice organizations in the state to develop a strategy to support an agenda supportive of increased expenditures on education and of prevention and rehabilitation programs for non-violent offenders as an alternative to incarceration.