Do you know where your tax dollars are being spent?

[princess16]

It's my tax dollars -- building and operating the state prisons and local jails has soared to an increase of 443% from 1978, and is still rising as the State Legislation and Judiciary Tribunal has chosen to make justice/law a primary source of employment. Legislators enact laws in the name of justice creating new sentences that have little discernible impact on crime, just more spending on jails and prisons, where the sentences imposed are nothing more than a death sentence at the cost of tax payers on most of the imprisoned.

Meanwhile children's education, health care, and related services and infrastructure suffer. The truth is the state spends more on corrections than on higher education. The rate of incarceration, for those who have and those who have not, has increase steadily, but all of the Tribunal and Legislative efforts overall have had little effect on crime. Upon release the judiciary and legislation has made offenders face major psychological, societal, and economic hurdles to produce higher recidivism to fool the people into thinking their system has to be. Not a law past nor "lock them up and throw away the key" mentality has had any effect on the real truth. Judges, Lawyers, Legislators and the Tribunal have created an industry at the expense of my tax dollar called Corrections (prison), at any cost.

If the State of Arizona released every prisoner in prison, the re-offenders would not add up to the cost required to operate the prison today, for I believe the rate of re-offenders would not amount to %0%, as most would only want to live the rest of their lives as productive citizens, for most would have spent over 15 years in our prison system and just want a chance to live their lives in some sort of living productively, especially the elderly.

Place before the House and Senate for reinstatement of grandfather act - or do as California has done, 50% of time served - take away consecutive sentences on same occasion crime to be served concurrent across the board on all crimes committed from 1978 to present.

 

[Valerie]

I found this cool site where who can sift through expenditures by state and even county. You can break things down by spending category, etc.

National Priorities Project Database | National Priorities Project

The Federal Budget can be divided into two types of spending according to how Congress appropriates the money: discretionary and mandatory. Discretionary spending refers to the portion of the budget which goes through the annual appropriations process each year.

In other words, Congress directly sets the level of spending on programs which are discretionary. Congress can choose to increase or decrease spending on any of those programs in a given year.

The discretionary budget is about one-third of total federal spending. The chart below indicates how discretionary spending was divided up in fiscal year 2005.

About half of the discretionary budget is 'national defense,' a government-defined function area that roughly corresponds in common parlance as 'military.' However, this category does not include foreign military financing, security assistance, and other programs commonly thought of as military. Other types of discretionary spending include the budget for education, many health programs, and housing assistance.

Mandatory spending includes programs, mostly entitlement programs, which are funded by eligibility rules or payment rules. Congress decides to create a program, for example, Food Stamps. It then determines who is eligible for the program and any other criteria it may want to lay out. How much is appropriated for the program each year is then determined by estimations of how many people will be eligible and apply for Food Stamps.

Unlike discretionary spending, the Congress does not decide each year to increase or decrease the Food Stamp budget; instead, it periodically reviews the eligibility rules and may change them in order to exclude or include more people.

Mandatory spending makes up about two-thirds of the total federal budget. By far the largest mandatory program is Social Security which makes up one-third of mandatory spending and continues to grow as the age demographic of the country shifts towards an older population.

Federal Discretionary and Mandatory Spending | National Priorities Project

 

[editec]

It is somewhat telling that in the land of the free and the home of the brave, we have a higher percentage of our fellow citizens in prison than any other nation on earth.

We are either the most criminally-inclined people on earth, or our criminal justice system truly is out of kilter.

What I find most disturbing are for-profit prisons which employ prisoners at slave wages.

That is clearly NOT a good idea if you are a believer that governments are a meance which bear watching, which, if I'm not mistaken is one thing that both conservatives AND liberals can usually agree on.

Incentivizing our legal system to put people in prison, which is the outcome of for profit prisons emploiying prisoners at slave wages, is about the dumbest thing that nation is doing right now.

It is even dumber and more a threat to the liberty of nation's citizens than FREE TRADE.

And you all must understand by now, how much I think FREE TRADE is a mistake, right?