The article “Educate, Don’t Incarcerate” by Cooper Kelley got me thinking about a lot of things. He describes America in a not-so-positive light, describing how America “spends more money on its inmates than its students.” He threw a bunch of statistics that would’ve gotten everyone quite alarmed to learn this about our country. And he hurled some food for thought at us—if we would just educate our students better and try to keep them from dropping out of school, then there wouldn’t be so many criminals, and our tax dollars wouldn’t be “drained” paying for all of the incarcerated.

I’ll admit, the points he gives aren’t too bad, since, as he said, “more than 80 percent of those who spend time in the corrections system are [high school] dropouts.” However, I disagree with his way of solving the problem. Cooper thinks that all we need to do to keep kids in school is put money into their education. What he doesn’t account for is the reasons why they drop out. In many cases, a high schooler will have to choose between an education or getting a job to pay the bills, since his/her parent(s) either isn’t getting enough money, or can’t work, or isn’t there at all. I believe Cooper is right in his thinking that keeping kids in school is the right way to go about dropping the percentage of criminals in the U.S., but to do that we have to help the teenagers themselves and not just their school life.