CFA Members Urge the State to Defund Prisons and Invest in Education

Mass incarceration in the U.S. does more than just harm people behind bars. Because the expansion of the prison system pulls funding away from public higher education, students are left carrying much of the burden through increased tuition costs that often turn into long-term debt.

Members at the CFA San Francisco chapter and Students for Quality Education (SQE) interns are starting a spring semester Abolition Reading Group to both learn and discuss strategies for addressing this issue. Please fill out this form if you would like to participate.

The U.S. has remained a global leader in incarceration. Even though our nation accounts for close to 5% of the global population, we hold nearly 20-25% of the world’s prison population. This is after imprisonment numbers fell by 25% between 2009 and 2021.

For years, our members have demanded that corporations divest from the prison industry and that California reduce its funding of the prison system.

More recently, we adopted a 2025 Spring CFA Assembly resolution urging the state of California defund our prisons and redistribute the money to where our communities need them most: public higher education. While the prison population has been rapidly declining, the CSU student population has risen from 350,254 in 1998 to 454,640 in 2023. During that time, student tuition has risen, and our university’s ongoing operations have been underfunded.

One reason is that mass incarceration is a continuation of a long history of racial oppression in our nation. The criminal justice system is the new Jim Crow, where Black people are disproportionately incarcerated at more than five times the rate of their white counterparts. In California, the number of prisoners skyrocketed from 25,000 in 1970 to more than 173,000 in the mid-2000s. Today, about 95,000 inmates remain, with Black Americans representing roughly 32% of the people in state and federal prisons. Moreover, one out of every three Black boys and one out of every six Latino boys born today can expect to go to prison in his lifetime—compared to one of every 17 white boys. Other marginalized groups are also disproportionately incarcerated, including poor people, queer people, and disabled people. 

Prisoners serving a felony conviction are denied the right to vote, and once they’re released, many struggle with barriers to employment, housing, and other basic areas of daily life.

There is no justice in the system, because that was never the point. Government entities and private industries have a strong interest in encouraging the growth of incarceration rates and keeping prisons full because it drives profit. Prisons mandate involuntary labor or servitude that is exceedingly cheap, with tens of thousands of prisoners making less than 74 cents per hour.

Additionally, even though state tax revenues have become more volatile in the past few years, prison spending has surged while state funding for public colleges and universities have waned. For fiscal year 2024-25, California spent $14.5 billion on state prisons, while only spending $8.6 billion on the CSU. Just last year, the state hit a record spending of $132,860 per inmate. This is twice as much as the annual tuition at California’s top private universities. The high price is due to lucrative employee compensation deals and improved health care costs for inmates.

But our tax dollars are being misspent and wasted on a system that doesn’t need them and shouldn’t have them. In 2024, the Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) recommended closing an additional five prisons to save around $1 billion, due to a surplus of 15,000 empty prison beds.

The state continues to pay billions of dollars for empty prison beds and for implementing policies that unjustly harm marginalized populations. The prison-industrial complex perpetuates the racial inequalities that already exist, and we can’t allow it to continue.

Please fill out this form if you are interested in the Abolition Reading Group! Once the readings are finalized, chapters should self-organize their meeting schedules and request funding for books from their CFA Executive Boards.