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To Scrap or Not To Scrap: Inmate Education Programs

By Matthew Mangino / Macon Chronicle-Herald In February, New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced a new statewide initiative to give prison inmates the opportunity to earn a college degree through funding college classes in prisons across the state. In a press release, the governor’s office revealed that New York currently spends $60,000 per year

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Northampton County, PA: Three-Pronged Strategy to Combat Recidivism

By Christopher Zoukis 

Not pleased with their perpetual need to keep expanding their prison’s capacity, local leaders and officials in Northampton County, Pennsylvania have been searching for a comprehensive strategy to reduce the county’s high levels of recidivism.  In 2012, the recidivism rate for inmates being released from Northampton County Prison was 58 percent, a full 18 points over the national average.   Image courtesy prisonlawblog.com

Encouragement has come from an earlier initiative in the county, contracting with Community Education Centers to provide alcohol treatment programs and parenting classes, which demonstrated the success of initiatives of this sort, cutting the rate of recidivism in half for those inmates who completed the program.  For over a year, a working party has been looking into further measures to build on this success.

In March, the final report, authored by the county’s re-entry coordinator Laura Savenelli, was presented to prison officials, local community leaders, and mental health providers at a re-entry summit in Bethlehem, PA.  The group identified three key problems:

  • ·         Seventy percent of inmates have substance abuse issues, which need to be addressed.
  • ·         Many prisoners have mental health problems, with more than 20 percent taking psychotropic medication.
  • ·         There is a lack of classroom space for GED classes, and a need for better vocational training.

As in almost all prisons and jails, a large majority of Northampton County Prison’s inmates, almost three-quarters, have substance abuse issues.  For many non-violent offenders, drug treatment is a far more effective response than incarceration.  One proposal, therefore, is to establish a specific drug court to handle these cases, and to decide who would be better served by treatment than a term of incarceration.

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A Rare Opportunity for Criminal Justice

By Dianne Frazee-Walker

Leave it to the baby-boomer generation to be a primary contributor of a new paradigm for criminal justice reform. After years of punitive legislation in an effort to cut-back on crime, young law-makers are having an epiphany about what really works when it comes to challenging high crime rates and lowering the recidivism rate.

Two major reasons for these changes are the almighty dollar and the fact that the current legislation is the first generation that hasn’t experienced the impact of Prohibition and totalitarian regimes.

Welcome to an era where for the first time in political history the right and left wingers are merging together with efforts to mend the present condition of the criminal justice system.  

The current economic status of the United States is partially responsible for legislature to take a more serious look at how mass incarceration is causing state and federal budgets to continue a growing deficit.

The 2008-2009 recession forced conservatives to consider a more effective approach to incarceration.

Between baby-boomers who are tired of punitive approaches for controlling crime and generation X-er’s (born 1965-1979) fresh philosophies around criminal justice legislation, it is an exciting time to witness the most significant criminal justice overhaul in American history. 

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No Prison Education in New York

Last week, Governor Andrew Cuomo (New York) canceled his innovative plan to offer basic college education programs to state prisoners.  The cancellation was the result of vociferous opposition from other New York State lawmakers.  Once again, politics trumped common sense. It’s been proven that prison education effectively rehabilitates convicts.  This results in reduced recidivism and

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Correctional Education Remains a Big Challenge

By Rebecca Gray 

The United States has become, to borrow an apt title from a 2013 Bill Moyers special, Incarceration Nation. (http://billmoyers.com/episode/full-show-incarceration-nation/) While Moyers’ program focused on the disproportionate number of racial and ethnic minorities behind bars (minorities comprise more than 60 percent of the prison population), the problem transcends racial issues. The prison population in the U.S. grew from 300,000 in the 1970s to over two million today, and the U.S. has a higher rate of incarceration than any other nation. We spend billions of dollars every year to keep people behind bars.

The U.S. prison system has been widely and justly criticized for its failure to rehabilitate and the high rate of recidivism. Nationwide, 40 percent of released prisoners are back in the system within three years of their release. (http://www.pewtrusts.org/uploadedFiles/wwwpewtrustsorg/Reports/sentencing_and_corrections/State_Recidivism_Revolving_Door_America_Prisons%20.pdf) (For more links to information on national recidivism rates, see this page on the National Criminal Justice Reference Service (NCJRS) site: https://www.ncjrs.gov/app/QA/Detail.aspx?Id=46&context=9.)

Though there are conflicting opinions about the best ways to prevent recidivism, there’s good evidence that education and training programs within the prisons play a significant role in helping participants stay out of trouble once they are released. Like everything else, however, education requires funding, which isn’t always forthcoming. And that’s just one of the big challenges facing correctional education today.

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Literacy Fact Sheet: Correctional Education

From the Oklahoma Department of Libraries 

Inmates have among the lowest academic skills and literacy rates of any segment of society. Upon completing their sentence, most inmates re-enter society no more skilled than when they entered the correctional facility.—Correction Education Data Guidebook, U.S. Department of Education

Need

  • The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate in the world. At yearend 2010, the total number of offenders under the supervision of the adult correction authorities represented about 3% of adults in the U.S. resident population, or 1 in every 33 adults. Some 2,266,800 adults were incarcerated in prisons or jails, while another 4,887,900 were under community supervision as part of the parole and probation systems. America locks up more of its citizens than Iceland, Japan, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Ireland, Germany and Italy combined.
  • In 2008, one of every 48 working-age men was in prison or jail.—The High Budgetary Cost of Incarceration
  • In 2008, federal, state, and local governments spend nearly $75 billion on corrections, with the large majority spent on incarceration.—The High Budgetary Cost of Incarceration
  • If the male high school graduation rate were increased by just 5%, annual crime-related savings to the nation would be approximately $5 billion dollars. The benefits would vary from state to state: South Dakota (at the low end) would save $1.6 million, Oklahoma (near the middle) would save $63 million, and California (at the high end) would save almost $675 million.—Saving Futures, Saving Dollars
  • Nationwide, three-quarters of state prison inmates are drop-outs, as are 59% of federal inmates. In fact, drop-outs are 3.5 times more likely than high school graduates to be incarcerated in their lifetime. African Americans are disproportionately incarcerated. Of all African American male drop-outs in their early 30’s, 52% have been imprisoned. 90% of the 11,000 youth in adult detention facilities have less than a 9th grade education.—Every Nine  Seconds in America a Student Becomes a Dropout
  • Both male and female prison inmates had lower average scores on all three literacy scales (prose, document, and quantitative) than adults of the same gender living in households. 56% of prisoners had Below Basic or Basic prose literacy skills.—The 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL)
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Prison Education Programs Effective at Reducing Recidivism

The RAND Corporation recently published a study that analyzed 50 research papers and studies concerning the effectiveness of prison education programs in reducing recidivism rates.  The study, as previously reported here at Prison Education News and at the Prison Law Blog, showed, yet again, that prison education programming is still the least expensive, most effective

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H.B. 2486 Clears Washington’s House Higher Education Committee

By Christopher Zoukis

The State of Washington is planning to change how it has delivered education to its incarcerated; the state now plans to allow the Department of Corrections to spend money on college-level education in its prisons.

College education for prison inmates has always been a hard sell to the American public.  Back in the tough-on-crime 1980s and 1990s, with crime rates and victimization soaring, the American people had enough.  They — and, in particular, their representatives in D.C. and their state capitols — engaged in a campaign to cut any perceived amenities for prison inmates and to lock up as many wrongdoers as possible and throw away the key.  It felt good to crime victims to see these wrongdoers punished and it felt like social progress to the lawmakers who enacted the supporting legislation.  Image courtesy www.wesleyan.edu

Fast forward twenty to thirty years and the situation has changed drastically.  Crime rates are down; in some cases, at historically low levels.  The murder rate in Washington State alone is at levels akin to those of the 1970s.  Regardless of this, the United States now incarcerates over 2 million prison inmates, and has several million more on probation, parole, or under other forms of community correctional control.  While the U.S. holds around 5 percent of the world’s population, it incarcerates around 25 percent of the world’s prisoners.  Something is clearly wrong with our crime control policies.

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Prison Education Programs Cut Following Recession

By Christopher Zoukis  Image courtesy dallasdoors.org

A recent study — “How Effective Is Correctional Education, and Where Do We Go from Here” — from the RAND Corporation has shown that following the recession, prison education programs were cut to make up for budgetary shortfalls.  Specifically, between 2009 and 2012, educational programming was reduced by 6 percent on average, with larger states slashing prison education funding by 10 percent and smaller states doing the same by 20 percent.  This flies in the face of recent research which shows prison education to result in a 13 percent reduction in recidivism rates.  According to Lois Davis, RAND senior policy researcher, “There are now fewer teachers, fewer course offerings and fewer students enrolled in academic education programs.”

To make the point even more clear, the RAND study also asserted that for every $1 spent on correctional education, $5 is saved on incarceration costs.  According to RAND’s Davis, “The debate is no longer about whether or not correctional education is effective or whether it’s cost effective.”  This is because correctional education has been proven to be both beyond any doubt.  The Urban Institute’s Jesse Jannetta agreed, telling Time Magazine, “Investing in things like prison education is a way to not just have people reoffend, but have them be successful wage earners and go back and make the biggest possible contribution to their communities.”

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