Elmer Smith: School money for prisons: Right-ing a wrong

YOU CAN'T LEAN any further to the right than Grover Norquist. This guy has to make a sharp left to get to the tea party.

Yesterday, he told me how proud he was of the Willie Horton ad campaign of 1988. That's the infamous ad in which conservatives linked presidential candidate Michael Dukakis to a policy that granted a weekend pass for a convicted murderer who, while out, stabbed a man and raped his wife.

The ad had such racist overtones that the Bush campaign promptly distanced itself. Norquist, on the other hand, still recalls it fondly.

So, this is the last guy you'd expect to back an NAACP initiative, especially one that claims that it is established policy in America to rob education budgets to build more prisons.

A massive study titled "Misplaced Priorities: Over Incarcerate, Under Educate," released yesterday by the NAACP, is the opening salvo in its national campaign to reverse that spending trend.

The report is a scathing but well-documented indictment of policies that have combined to "waste" money by locking up people who could be treated in more effective and cost-effective ways while steadily reducing expenditures for public schools and colleges.

Pennsylvania and Philadelphia in particular were singled out as among the nation's worst offenders.

Pennsylvania taxpayers will spend nearly $290 million to jail residents sentenced in 2008 from 11 Philadelphia neighborhoods, the report said.

"These neighborhoods are home to just a quarter of the city's population but account for more than half of the state's roughly $500 million in prison spending," according to the report.

The link becomes even clearer with this finding: "In Philadelphia, 23 of the 35 lowest-performing schools are clustered in or very near neighborhoods with the highest incarceration rates."

Norquist, who heads Americans for Tax Reform, is not about to call for more education spending. But he has become an evangelist for the cause of reducing prison spending.

"We certainly agree with that," he said. "The cost/benefit ratio of locking people up doesn't work. There are better alternatives."

He has launched his own attack on prison spending with an organization called Right on Crime. He has enlisted conservatives like Newt Gingrich and Ward Connerly as allies.

Norquist cited a Texas program that diverts funding to districts that reduce recidivism while dropping prison costs. And he went to Washington to back a bill that reduced the 100-to-1 disparity between sentences for crack and powdered cocaine.

"Frankly," Norquist admitted, "too many conservatives, including me, figured all we needed from government was an Army and a judicial system.

"We didn't spend much time on how to spend effectively in those areas. Now it's time for conservatives to step up. Liberals don't have as much credibility on these issues as we do."

In California, then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger backed a proposal to prohibit spending more on prisons than on higher education. He waxed poetic in his state-of-the-state address.

"What does it say about a state that focuses more on prison uniforms than caps and gowns?" Schwarzenegger asked.

Ben Jealous, president and chief executive officer of the NAACP, is willing to march with conservatives, even those like Norquist who oppose education spending.

"This is critical," he told me yesterday. "America has 5 percent of the world's population but 25 percent of its prisoners. Black Americans are five times more likely to be incarcerated than black South Africans were at the height of apartheid.

"Some of these people really should be in rehabs or alternative settings. It costs less and it doesn't needlessly tear families apart.

"In Pennsylvania, they took money right out of the education budget and put it into the prisons budget. How do you justify that?"

Grover Norquist wouldn't have spent the money at all. But he backs the call for less prison spending even if it ends up in school budgets.

"Some people are in prison because we're mad at them," he said. "It doesn't make us safer, it just makes us feel better."

He offers conservatives this simple message: We can be tough on crime as long as it's not too tough on us.

Send email to smithel@phillynews.com or call 215-854-2512. For recent columns: www.philly.com/ElmerSmith