Michigan is one of only four states in the nation to spend more on prisons than higher education, according to a new report by the Pew Center for the States.

We share the dubious distinction with Vermont, Oregon, and Connecticut.

"Year by year, corrections budgets are consuming an ever-larger chunk of state general funds, leaving less and less in the pot for other needs," the Pew researchers wrote, in a basic amplification of what many Michigan college student leaders, natural resources advocates, arts advocates, and local government leaders have shouted for years.

Among those loud voices is former University of Michigan President James Duderstadt. In his new "Michigan Roadmap Redux," Duderstadt cites no fewer than one dozen recent lengthy public policy reports outlining the urgent need to prepare the state's present and future workforce for the competition of the global economy. Strong investment in higher education and decreased emphasis on prison spending are common to most, if not all, of those reports.

"Yet these visions for Michigan's future, supported by such carefully considered and compelling studies and embraced by a growing number of citizens, have failed to stimulate the actions necessary to address the challenges facing our state," Duderstadt writes. "The state's public leaders remain moored to obsolete political philosophies and distracted by largely irrelevant issues, failing miserably in their responsibilities to work together to address the key issues of restructuring Michigan's government and tax system to enable the necessary investments in our future."

In reaction to the Pew report this week, Lansing's leading law-and-order legislator, Senator Alan Cropsey suggested the issue isn't prison spending, it's whether people are safe.

Can we all agree that worker talent and competitiveness are key measures of safety in the 21st Century?

To clot the flow of limited state tax funds to prisons, Democrats propose prison sentence reforms while Republicans favor privatization and finding other efficiencies in the system.

As we've asked before -- WHY NOT DO BOTH?!