Arizona legislator pushes for education to slow incarceration rates

PHOENIX — Prisons are a popular place in Arizona and a state lawmaker wants that to change.

Arizona has the eighth-highest incarceration rate in the the country, according to Bureau of Justice statistics.

For every 100,000 residents, the state has 643 inmates. That could stand alone as one of the highest incarceration rates in the world.

“Incarceration through the Department of Corrections is taking a larger and larger chunk of our state budget,” Arizona Rep. Mark Cardenas said.

“So we have to start looking at different ways to start being smart with taxpayer dollars and start saving money because we are not getting more revenue but we need to look at how to smartly spend the money that the taxpayers give us.”

The lawmaker recently began working on a bill to legalize the personal use of marijuana to generate more tax dollars and lower prison rates.

Cardenas said the state is investing too many resources into locking up people and not enough on higher education.

Arizona has 16 state prisons compared with three state universities.

Cardenas said he thinks reducing sentencing rates for petty crimes such as marijuana possession could help reduce the state deficit and free up tax dollars for higher education.

“We can then start to pull back some of the money that we are required to give to the Department of Corrections every year and then redeploy it in a different area such as higher education, which has raised tuition rates by over 100-percent in the last decade,” he said.

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