A little-known Alabama Congressman decided to make his name on the GOP’s radar by using a dogwhistle racial slander to criticize the DC government during a committee meeting Wednesday, calling Washington, DC schools “inmate factories,” according to NBC News.  Aside from repeating a racist trope, however, the Alabaman may want to look at his state’s record first.

Representing a state ranked in the bottom 10% for education and in the top 20% for highest incarceration rates in the United States, Alabama Congressman Gary Palmer decried DC’s schools, telling D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson during a hyperbolically named “Overdue Oversight of the Capitol City Part 1” meeting,  “You’ve got crappy schools. Your schools are not only dropout factories, they’re inmate factories.”

The incarceration rate in Washington, DC–a self-enclosed urban federal district where residents are still taxed but have no federal representational power–has an incarceration rate of 899 per 100,000 residents, including those on pre-trial detention and minors in juvenile facilities, according to the Prison Policy Initiative.  (DC’s prisons are more crowded thanks to the influx of “correctional tourists” from out of state serving sentences in federal facilities within city limits.) According to the same source, Alabama incarcerates people at a rate of 938 per 100,000 residents.  Because Alabama’s schools are so poorly rated, someone needs to explain to Palmer that 938 is greater than 899, meaning Alabama has a wider school-to-prison pipeline.