Secondary students protest prison spending
SAN LEANDRO, California — On October 2, thousands of high school students in San Leandro left their classrooms to protest against too much state spending on prisons and too little on schools. The students marched about a mile through the city, on the eastern side of San Francisco Bay, giving speeches at a sheriff's office and a mall. "They're just trying to keep us in jail", said a protester, Ivan Garcia. "They aren't trying to say, you know, 'Go to college'."
The protest, by mostly minority students, came in the wake of a study that cited a growing gap in the growth of state spending on prisons and higher education. Angela Davis, the 1960s civil rights movement leader, watched from the sidelines. "They're like kids who are showing us the way", she said.
The Justice Policy Institute, a study group in San Francisco, recently made public a study showing that California's budget for higher education had shrunk by 3%, while spending for prisons and other jail units had jumped 60% under the state's Republican governor, Pete Wilson.
The study also found that five black males are in prison for every black male in a state university, and that three Hispanic males are added to California's prison population for every one enrolling at a four-year public university.