Spending our dollars

So, If Bush’s budget passes as presented, we citizens will spend almost $200,000,000 to promote sexual abstinence in FY2006. Ignoring for the moment the question of whether the money should be spent on this program, how does one compute the financial return on this investment? I suppose the White House can trot out various reasons for making the investment, but they are very likely clouded in questions of morality, which, as we well know, is an area where reasonable people can disagree. It’s harder to disagree with the numbers, provided one agrees with the algorithm.

An article in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine prompted me to make some calculations on the financial return we are foregoing as a result of changes made in the Pell Grant regulations in 1994.

You may recall the ‘90s as a decade where we ‘got tough on crime’. One of the overlooked aspects of this policy was the denial of Pell grants to prisoners, the sentiment being why do anything for these criminals other than punish them. It didn’t matter that this policy flies in the face of just about all studies into recidivism. They’ve concluded that a college education lowers the rate of recidivism; in a few cases, the rate has gone from 35% to 1%. More typically, the rate has declined from 30% to 8%.

In 1994 there were 350 prisons offering college level courses to their inmates. Today, there are 12. Let’s assume that at each prison there are five inmates enrolled in the college program, or a total of 1690 who no longer take courses. Using a non-college recidivism rate of 30%, we’ll have 507 returning to prison. That 507 drops to 135 if we use the 8% college recidivism rate. That’s a difference of 372.

If we assume an annual cost per inmate of $25,000 (which, I think, is low), the annual cost to house these 372 is $9,295,000. If they’re in jail for three years, we’re up to $27,885,000. The cost of the Pell grants is $2000, or $3,380,000 for the 1690 inmates in the program in 1994. Multiplying this cost by a three year stay yields $10,140,000. Or, a savings of $17,745,000. I suspect that this amount (seventeen million) pales when compared with the cost of the crimes committed by those non-college inmates who return to jail.

Where would you rather spend our money? On some nebulous advertising program or on reducing the crime in this country?