HardSchell Report

A current federal minimum wage of $7.25:

In July 2019, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Raise the Wage Act, which would increase the federal minimum wage in steps to $15 by 2025. This increase would affect 23 million Americans with a direct boost in their pay, including over 9 million parents and 14 million persons over age 24.

If passed into law, the increase would materially improve the lives of these workers and their families. It would also reduce the burden placed on federally- and state-funded public safety net programs, which working families turn to when they do not earn enough to meet their basic needs.

Lack of Public Pre-K schooling:

According to National Bureau of Economic Research “for poor children, increases in Head Start spending and increases in public K12 spending each individually increased educational attainment and earnings, and reduced the likelihood of both poverty and incarceration in adulthood.”  In other words investing in Pre-K pays for itself in reduced prison time at an average cost of $37K per year. Private day care or pre-school is not cheap. In Illinois, the average cost is almost $14K per year. This can preclude a parent from finding employment and can contribute to a need for assistance such as food stamps, which of course is a cost to everyone.

Education which doesn’t prepare students to thrive:

High school dropouts are more likely to end up in prison. Providing at-risk kids with high-quality early learning programs can reduce crime and the resulting costs, other expenditures, and long-term negative impacts on society.
7 out of 10 state prisoners nationwide do not have a high school diploma and finding stable employment after prison is very challenging. In Pennsylvania, dropouts annually consume $683 more than they contribute in taxes. Pennsylvania could “see a combination of crime-related savings and additional revenue of about $288 million annually if the male high school graduation rate increased by just five percent.

Harsh revenge-based prison sentences:

America’s prison population has grown to unprecedented levels and imposed record-high costs on taxpayers. It is time to ask what we are doing: revenge, or safety?  After decades of tough-on-crime policies, we have experienced little return on our investment— as rates of incarceration have continued to rise, rates of recidivism have increased since the early 1980s, remaining relatively unchanged from the mid-1990s through the present.Norway has managed to avoid the allure of vengeance and brutality by focusing on a reasoned approach to rehabilitating criminals.

Norway has one of the lowest rates of recidivism in the world. In the United States, at least 43 percent of inmates in state prisons re-offend within three years. Norway, which measures recidivism after two years, has a rate of 20 percent. For prisoners released from Bastoy, the country’s most exemplary model of a compassionate, rehabilitative prison, that number is a mere 16 percent.