I’m going to drop out of college and become a correctional officer.
According to a recent report by the San Francisco Chronicle, in five years, the amount of money California spends on the prison system will exceed the amount being spent on its universities ““ the first time in state history.
This is because California pays its correctional officers substantially more than any other state.
According to the Los Angeles Times, 6,000 California correctional officers, who only need a high school diploma to qualify for the job, earn over $100,000 per year.
To put this in perspective, the starting salary for a full professor at UCLA with a Ph.D. earns on average a mere $80,000 per year, according to the University of California Office of the President Web site.
Although correctional officers do an important job, we should not be lavishing raises and overtime pay upon them at the expense of public universities. Unfortunately, this is exactly what’s happening now. As California gives more of its budget to the prison systems, our student fees for the next academic year will be increasing from 7 to 10 percent.
Does this mean that our state legislators care more about correctional officers than our ability to acquire an affordable education? Yes it does.
We poor students do not belong to a union that has $21.9 million in annual funding to pay off politicians.
However, the prison guards’ union does. The California Correctional Peace Officers Association has a fairly easy time of manipulating politicians through campaign contributions. For example, former Gov. Gray Davis received over $3 million from CCPOA and, in turn, increased their salaries to an annual $73,000.
To his credit, Gov. Schwarzenegger did not accept any contributions from CCPOA, and it shows. In response to California’s prison overcrowding problem, he has been transferring inmates to private prisons in other states. CCPOA immediately filed a lawsuit, probably terrified that Schwarzenegger’s actions would cause Californians to realize how ridiculously cheaper it is to allow private companies to run prison systems.
State lawmakers could do this by refusing to build any more public prisons and instead hire private companies to build new facilities and maintain them.
According to research conducted by the Reason Foundation, a public-policy think tank, most studies comparing the cost of private and public-run prison facilities found that the private facilities were less costly and drove down the cost of the public prisons ““ an effect that competition generally has in a free market.
Adding private prisons to California would have three big added benefits.
First, it would reduce the prison’s overcrowding problem. This means the state would need fewer publicly employed prison guards to work overtime ““ and overtime pay, according to the Los Angeles Times, is often what helps boost guards’ pay over the $100,000 mark.
Second, it would diminish the clout CCPOA has with our state legislators. Which is exactly why CCPOA so vehemently opposes private prisons ““ it would prevent the union from strong-arming politicians into giving them more extravagant raises.
And most importantly, it would save California large amounts of money ““ funds that could be used to lower our student fees or increase financial aid.
The only way we can persuade our lawmakers to change is through public pressure. It’s time we told our representatives that it is not OK for them to pay a person with a high school diploma more than the professors who mentor us, and that it is not acceptable to increase our fees because some organization is particularly generous during campaign time.
A particularly effective way to loudly and clearly send this message to CCPOA is on Election Day.
Before you begin filling out your ballots, take a moment to check which candidates the union has given money to, and then make a mental note to vote for the other guy.
And if that fails, we can always send them our resumes instead.
Interested in the job? E-mail Strickland at kstrickland@media.ucla.edu and she’ll send you an application. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.