Making the invisible visible: cuts to government social programs

Here is a rule of thumb regarding government social programs: You usually learn about them only when their budgets are reduced.  At that point, you hear about draconian cuts to essential services that you didn’t even know existed. 

It has been received wisdom for decades that prison rehabilitation programs were decimated during the heartless Reagan years of greed and that no inmate who wants to turn his life around can possibly find the wherewithal in prison to do so—assuming for the moment for the sake of argument that a social service program is necessary for that end.  So it is surprising to read in the New York Times about very recent “rich” arts programs in California prisons, long painted by the media and by anti-incarceration advocates as service wastelands:

Two years ago, arts in corrections programs were a mainstay of prisons across the country, embraced by administrators as a way to channel aggression, break down racial barriers, teach social skills and prepare inmates for the outside world. There was an arts coordinator in each of the 33 California state prisons, overseeing a rich variety of theater, painting and dance.
But these programs have become a fading memory, casualties of the budget crises that have overwhelmed state and local governments nationwide. Nowhere is that truer than here, where prisons are so overcrowded that the Supreme Court in May ordered the state to start releasing inmates.

Dance in prisons?  Who knew?  I’m not necessarily against such programs, despite their usually pitiful record of success, but their existence should certainly be weighed against the notion that taxpayers are contributing nothing that might allow a criminal to escape gang culture.  To be sure, there is certainly a big difference between the resources showered on a theater major at NYU and those a car thief in Chino State will encounter.  Stil, I doubt whether any of the plaintiffs’ and amicus briefs in California’s decades-long prison overcrowding litigation mentioned this “rich variety” of arts programming.