Speech on Racism and School Budget Cuts

The economic crisis today provides us with a clear view of the priorities that the state of California, America, or, more generally, any profit driven economy must take. Recessions are a common phenomenon within our economic system that occur roughly every 8 years and this one has been said to be the worst yet since the Great Depression. In our modern day production there's no organization of what's produced; the only driving force of production is profit. With this anarchy of production, inevitably in time, the economy produces far more than it needs and is forced to shrink the economy along with amount of jobs and public funding in what we casually call a recession. Recessions are not a natural phenomenon, but only an affect of implementing an economy that is ultimately driven by profit, not by need.

I would like to place our recent massive school budget cuts in perspective to our increase prison spending. This perspective is also relevant to the ever increasing spending of war. I want to focus on how the choices of this spending reveals that these priorities are not in favor of working people.

Since 1984 state spending for higher education has decreased while prison spending has increased by 126%. The prison population has increased about 75% in the last 20 years, which is 3 times faster than the adult population. This disproportional increase in the prison population is not due some increase in criminal activity, but rather because policies that determine what is prison worthy have changed. And how effective are these new rough and tough polices? The California prison system has a staggering 70% recidivism rate. Only 30% of those who go to prison are rehabilitated and do not go back again. What are we to think of a system that only manages to complete its function, rehabilitation, 30% percent of the time? It seems that rehabilitation may not be the central priority of imprisonment. The state contributes $4600 per student in the CSU system, while the cost of incarcerating any prisoner is $49,000 per year. If current policies continue prison spending will overtake higher education spending in the not-so-distant future.

The 170,000 people approximately that are locked up are overwhelmingly impoverished Blacks and Latinos. It's a remarkable fact that for every Latino in a 4-year university, there are three Latinos in prison; and for every black student you see on this campus or any other university, there are FIVE black people in prison. It is clear from the prison population that racism still plagues us. Many of the students who previously could marginally afford to go to a university and who now must drop out due to the 30% percent increase in tuition, it is predicted, will be disproportionately people of color. Racism is a concern to every working person no matter what color or sex, because racism is not in the interests of working people. Working people do not reap the benefits when women get paid less than men for equal work; nor do working people benefit when people of color are underpaid for the crucial jobs they fill, such as the California farm workers, for instance.

Those who reap the profits from the inequality of wages derived from racism are those who reap the benefits of racism. And those who reap all the profits, in a profit system, are those who get to call the tune. Racism will never go away within a profit system since it will always be profitable to implement it. Ethics must always takes second priority to profitability in a capitalist economy. If your competitor reaps the benefits of unethical practices, then you must also, if you hope to compete in capitalism. But profitability is not the central interest of working people. The schools cutbacks are also not in the interests of the working people. The same people who create all value in a society, working people, are the ones that these education cutbacks are not benefiting. Just as the incarceration policies and increase spending on prisons are not allocating our resources to benefit working people. And the wars that have no limit to how much money we spend on them are, again, not in the interests of working people. We should take the economic crisis as an opportunity to see clearly that the state's priorities are not in the interests of working people, and recognize that these policies for war, for prison and for education cutbacks are not in our common interest as a working class.