Higher Education In Prison

LCCC axes 5 managers due to cuts

The eliminated employees are: Helen Conner, physical plant/facilities administrator, $35,871; Christine Donnolo, associate dean of continuing education, $64,589; Joseph Grilli, vice president of training institutes, external affairs and planning, $103,840; Michelle McCabe, director of the Substance Abuse Education and Training Institute, $46,603; and Sandra Richards, human resources generalist, $46,603.

The staff cuts will save roughly $400,000, including benefits, said college President Thomas P. Leary.

Leary does not expect further staff reductions. Cuts in travel and conferences and other across-the-board trimming will make up the rest of the shortfall, he said.

“The college’s budget must be based on sources of income,” Leary said in a media release. “The college has experienced a significant decrease in funding from the Commonwealth and level funding from Luzerne County for fiscal year 2011-12.”

Despite the loss of state funding, the college’s operating budget revenue is projected to increase slightly, from $39.5 million to $39.6 million, the budget shows.

Payroll eats up most of the operating budget, with about $31.9 million spent on salaries and fringe benefits, according to the budget.

The duties handled by the five managers will be assumed by other workers or eliminated, Leary said.

For example, the Substance Abuse Education and Training Institute will cease to exist unless alternate funding is identified, Leary said. The institute, which was based out of an office because it did not have its own building, provided seminars for area residents and professionals targeting drug and alcohol addiction.

The institute, which was largely the brainchild of former county commissioner Greg Skrepenak, was not tied to any curriculum, Leary said, emphasizing that he and the administration focused on preserving student academic programs and affordable tuition.

McCabe was hired to oversee the substance abuse institute in 2007. She was married to Jeffrey Piazza, and Piazza’s father, August Piazza, was a member of the community college’s Board of Trustees at the time of her hiring. Jeffrey Piazza was sentenced to six months in prison for mail fraud as part of the federal corruption probe.

Richards is the wife of former county human resources director Doug Richards, who was also charged as part of the corruption probe. Richards pleaded guilty to accepting money from a consulting group and was sentenced to 15 months in prison, though he is appealing that sentence.

Prisons or Higher Education, Which Do We Fund - LA Progressive

It’s been widely reported that states are dedicating increasingly larger portions of their budgets to prisons and smaller portions to higher education. With funding for higher education and prisons or corrections generally occupying the portion of the state’s budget that is neither mandated by federal requirements nor driven by population, the two are in direct competition. As a result, growth in the prison budget translates into shrinkage of the higher education budget.

In a LA Progressive article in March 2010 entitled, “ First Solve the Prison Crisis Then Fix California’s Budget “, Dick Price reported, “In a recent 23-year period, California erected 23 prisons—one a year, each costing roughly $100 million dollars annually to operate, with both Democratic and Republican governors occupying the statehouse—at the same time that it added just one campus to its university system, UC Merced.”

The chart above shows the amounts budgeted for higher education and corrections in California’s budget. In the 2000-2001 budget year, the budget for higher education was almost twice that of the prison. Over a nine-year period, the prison budget grew to almost equal that budgeted for higher education.

According to the Pew Center on the States , in the past twenty years, spending on prisons has grown six times faster than spending on higher education, across the nation.

In California, for example, thirty years ago the prison budget represented just 2% of the state’s overall budget. Today, 10% of California’s budget is allocated to cover prison related costs.

In a report entitled, “ Misplaced Priorities “, the NAACP examines the increase in prison spending in America and addresses the impact this increase has had on our state budgets and our nation’s children.

Focusing on six American cities, the report concludes that there has been a “steady shift of state funds away from education and toward the criminal justice system”.

Data gathered from the cities of Los Angeles, New York, Houston, Indianapolis, Philadelphia, and Jackson, Mississippi, was used to support the findings made by the NAACP in this recently published report.  According to the report, in Los Angeles –

More than 50 percent of the people who were in prison, and are now on parole and live in zip codes that are home to only 18 percent of the city’s adults. This means that more than a billion taxpayer dollars are spent every year to incarcerate people from Los Angeles neighborhoods where less than 20 percent of Los Angeles residents live.

Higher education in prison, a contradiction in terms?

Higher education in prison, a study of the impact of college education upon selected inmates of Draper Correctional Center, Elmore, Alabama

Higher education abstracts

Can prisons work?, the prisoner as object and subject in modern corrections

Higher education and national affairs