Frank Pallone: “One is the juxtaposition, if you will, of the amount of money that we spend on prisons versus education. Of course, we…”

“One is the juxtaposition, if you will, of the amount of money that we spend on prisons versus education. Of course, we all know we have to have prisons and the Federal Government, of course, has been providing funding to build more prisons. But the bottom line is that I think that our whole reason why we think education is such a priority is because it builds a foundation for the future and is essentially preventive. People that are well educated, it is less likely that they are going to have to be committing crime or going to prison. If we leverage the amount of money that we would spend, for example, on school construction and compare that to what would have to be spent on prison construction down the road, clearly there is no comparison. That is why it makes sense to spend Federal dollars on school construction and renovation.”