As a child, Troy Williams grew calloused to the South Central Los Angeles street ethos: Gangs, violence, drugs and firearms. But Williams, now barrel-chested and 43-years-old, didn’t have the confidence to speak up in a classroom until he became a resident of San Quentin State Prison. Story  from KALW News.

“In the past, I never even felt adequate in a classroom,” Williams said. “Now, I can come in, I can learn and be comfortable.”

Each weekday in this ancient, cinematic citadel – perched on the shores of San Francisco Bay since the mid-19th century – teams of educated volunteers try to provide convicted felons a college-level education.

Williams, along with about 300 inmates at the prison, qualify for enrollment in the Prison University Project, a nonprofit program that offers inmates basic education and even an associate of arts degree through Patten University, an accredited university in Oakland.

The program at San Quentin is a rare bright spot in a dismal era for California’s overcrowded prisons, which consume more than $8 billion annually. State budget crunches and tough sentencing laws have deteriorated the once model system to the point that in recent years federal courts have declared conditions in the state’s prisons unconstitutional.

Started in 1996 with just two classes and no budget, the project has incorporated as a nonprofit and runs on a budget of nearly $400,000 and a staff of about 60 unpaid volunteers, said Jody Lewen, the project’s executive director.

“One of the core commitments that we’ve been able accomplish is providing a real high-quality level education, not just a diploma mill,” Lewen said. “We’re preparing students so that they can succeed.”

Lewen said the budget is built entirely from private donations, which fund three full-time administrators. About 30 of the volunteers serve as math tutors, Lewen said, while the backbone of the program is the more than 20 volunteer teachers, all of whom have at least a master’s degree in the field they teach.

Kelly Jane Rosenblatt has taught English for three years at the prison, while working toward a doctoral degree in English Literature at the University of Oregon.

For Rosenblatt, 31, the work is personal.

“My father was incarcerated, and I realized when I was corresponding with him that there’s not a lot of opportunities in prison,” Rosenblatt said. “When I became a grad student, and eligible to volunteer, I felt like I needed to help.”

During her English 101 course, Rosenblatt guides nearly 20 students – men of all colors ranging in age from the mid-20s to the mid-60s – through an eclectic mix of short stories and novels. During a class in early June, the discourse meandered from urban farming to agricultural corporations, probing Roald Dahl’s “Pig” for insight and even touching on Upton Sinclair’s classic, “The Jungle.”

Rosenblatt challenged her students to identify complex strains of symbolism and allegory in with a rigor on par with a university-level curriculum.

The students engaged, sometimes clumsily, but with enthusiasm.

“I look forward to coming to this class a lot,” said Juan Haines, a graying, soft-spoken 53-year-old who has been in prison for 14 years. He is serving a life sentence for bank robbery. “To get into a classroom environment and to talk on an intellectual basis, with other human beings, is different than being out on the yard.”

The waitlist to enroll in classes at San Quentin is about 100 inmates, Rosenblatt said.

While the nonprofit education program is on the rise, rehabilitative and educational opportunities in California prisons have been steadily slashed over the years.

In 1994, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act barred people incarcerated in the U.S. from receiving Pell Grants, a shift that decimated higher education in U.S. prisons.

In California, the decline has been particularly tragic, said Robert Perkinson, as associate professor of American Studies at the University of Hawaii and the author of “Texas Tough: The rise of America’s prison empire,” a book published last year.

“At mid-century, California was the model for professional, treatment-oriented, research-supported incarceration with an aim toward smooth reintegration,” Perkinson said. “The fall of this system into the waste that it is today is maybe the greatest tragedy in American prison history.”

Perkinson attributes the decline in rehabilitative and education programs to a triumph of politics over sound practices. As politicians realized they could score popularity with tough-talk against felons and cuts to programming in a system whose consumers don’t vote, Perkinson said, corrections policies have taken several steps back.

Now, nonprofits like the Prison University Project have stepped into the breach.

Lewen hopes the program doesn’t just give felons a better chance to succeed the next time they are released, but also raises awareness about the conditions in which more than 160,000 California prisoners live.

“We’re educating the inmates, but really what we’re also doing is bringing all these folks in from the (educational) academy,” Lewen said. “And they’re becoming educated about the prison system and the criminal justice system in a way they never would have been before.”

But the focus remains providing education in prison, bringing light into a place synonymous with darkness, despair and punishment, with an eye on reducing the numbers of parolees who re-offend.

Williams is one student who pledges his life has been changed forever. He has been in prison for 14 years, and is serving a life sentence with the possibility of parole for his role in a violent robbery.

Williams is known among his teachers as a quick study who enthusiastically participates in class discussions and always does his homework.

He said his favorite class is ethics.

If he is ever released, Williams vows to work with troubled youth.

“When I was 10-years-old, my older brother told me what a Crip and a Blood was,” Williams said. “That was where we grew up, that environment. I want to save other kids from going down the paths we went down.”

jchev California, Inmate Education

Virgil Ventura of the District wants to be an auto mechanic. Melvin Parks of the District wants a business degree. Roman Fuentes of Lorton wants something valuable he can take with him when he returns to the Philippines. Reported in the Washington Post.

For most graduates, an education offers hope for the future. And for the April graduates of the General Educational Development program at the Alexandria Detention Center, getting an education gives them a chance to focus on the future while serving time for past actions.

Ventura was at the center on a malicious wounding charge. Parks violated his probation. Fuentes was being deported because of a firearms charge.

“Half of my guys are getting released in the next six months,” Krista Sofonia, the center’s adult education coordinator, said in April. “For them, they kind of have to have this to take the next step.”

Interest in the GED diploma program has increased at the center, as has the number of inmates passing the test.

Enrollment in the GED and English as a Second Language programs rose from 58 students in the 2004-05 school year to 259 in 2008-09. As of March, 169 students were enrolled.

In the 2004-05 school year, 53 percent of the inmates who took the GED test passed. By 2008-09, 66 percent had passed. In March, there was a 61 percent pass rate. Sheriff Dana Lawhorne said he tries to emphasize the program to the inmates.

“Our hope is when they return to the community, they can be gainfully employed,” he said.

Lawhorne created a GED unit, where students enrolled in the program live together and can tutor one another. The unit “creates a positive learning atmosphere,” he said.

The D.C. Department of Corrections launched a GED program in April 2008, in which inmates serve as tutors within housing units. Spokeswoman Sylvia Lane said that 142 inmates completed the program and that 57 percent passed the test.

Tutors and inmates live together in Prince George’s County’s education unit, as well.

“We find the focus is much better if they are in one unit rather than pulling them from all over the jail,” said Mary Lou McDonough, director of the county’s Department of Corrections.

The Prince George’s program is limited to how many tests the jail can afford and how many people can live in the GED housing unit. Thirty to 36 inmates are in the education unit at one time, McDonough said. Over the past five years, the inmates average a 44 percent pass rate, she said.

At the Alexandria Detention Center graduation ceremony in April, inmates in caps and gowns marched from a tiny law library through the jail’s gymnasium, passing family members and other inmates before taking their seats.

Alexandria Police Chief Earl L. Cook spoke of the importance of having a GED diploma and how it puts the graduates on a “safer, more defined road” to success. He also encouraged the graduates to seize the opportunity now. “Time and again, my lesson is try to grab it now. The future is not promised,” Cook said.

For Parks, receiving a GED diploma is an accomplishment long overdue. And his mother, Vanessa Parks, agreed. She cheered in the audience as her son’s name was called.

“It was my dream come true for my son,” Vanessa Parks said.

jchev Inmate Education, Washington DC

A pair of longstanding academic programs for young inmates on Rikers Island, including one dating to the Koch administration that was a first for a United States correctional facility, are being merged into a single system, city officials said. The move is aimed in large part at recalling the roots of the policy’s educational mission from the mid-1980s: It will reintegrate curriculums so that students can stay on track to recover credits, take Regents exams and earn high school diplomas or equivalency diplomas in their time behind bars. News from the New York Times.

As a practical matter, blending the two programs — known as the Horizon and Island Academies — will also involve consolidating an array of disparate classroom spaces at the jail, in part to give more students greater access to core schooling materials, like computers, officials said.

Currently, many of the 13 locations around the nine jails on Rikers Island where teachers are assigned are “under capacity,” said Timothy F. Lisante, the deputy superintendent of District 79, who said that consolidating would also cut costs.

Under the plans, the merger will be completed in time for the start of the new academic season in September. Summer classes will not be affected.

Michael Mendel, the secretary of the United Federation of Teachers, the union representing teachers, said he was loath to criticize the substance of the policy changes and voiced support for any effort by the city’s Department of Education to improve the program.

But the process was flawed, he said.

In particular, he said the timing of the announcement, with the news circulating at the close of the school year, was jarring to many educators who did not see it coming.

The teachers, who are part of the staff of roughly 200 serving both schools, were notified of the planned merger last Monday, after administrators were told the preceding weekend, Mr. Mendel said.

“It is irresponsible to do this the last day of school,” Mr. Mendel said. “They did not wake up and decide these programs were no good in June.”

Consequently, he said, teachers will have to reapply for their positions on Rikers Island, and there will be a hectic time over the summer to prepare for the new system.

Also, the consolidated classroom space and academic curriculum will require a smaller staff, so some teachers will have to move to other schools within the district, officials said. While Mr. Lisante said there would be an effort to staff the new programs with as many current educators as possible, he said, “We want the best and brightest teachers.”

Mr. Lisante defended the timing of the announcement, saying it was meant to minimize distractions and to “keep the focus on the students and use the summer to plan the redesign.”

Dora B. Schriro, the commissioner of the Department of Correction, said a better educated population in the jail contributes to the “day-to-day safety and security of the correctional system.”

While head of corrections in Arizona, she said, she found higher educational achievement linked to less recidivism.

She said the new city program would offer a “richer and more sophisticated set” of academic offerings. Longer school days are being contemplated, she said.

When Island Academy opened in 1986, it was in response to parents who did not want jail to derail the high school education of children sent there, Mr. Lisante said. That program serves students 16 to 19. The Horizon Academy was set up for 19-to-21-year-olds, with an emphasis on equivalency diplomas.

Under one combined program, all students, regardless of age, will have more seamless experiences during usually brief incarcerations, he said. Credits will be earned in a more concentrated period, he said. And admissions will be more tightly controlled, to assess individual inmates’ language, academic and other needs.

Jessica Scaperotti, a spokeswoman for the Bloomberg administration, hailed the collaboration by officials from the city’s education and correction departments to revamp a school system she characterized as not working properly.

“What the city was looking to do was overhaul the system so that we could bring together the expertise of educators, youth development specialists and correction professionals so they can better support the distinctive academic and social needs of students that are incarcerated,” Ms. Scaperroti said.

jchev Inmate Education, Juvenile Justice, New York

The Wyoming Department of Corrections has recently been granted $242,000 through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to strengthen the inmate educational infrastructure in Wyoming prisons. Betty Abbott, Correctional Education Programs Manager, submitted the proposal to the Wyoming Department of Workforce Services (DWS), who is managing the funding for the State of Wyoming. News from Department of Corrections.

“This is a tremendous boost to our education programming,” Abbott said. “These monies will help us move even farther ahead, better ensuring that we’re providing inmates the education and skills that they need to be productive citizens and stay out of prison once they’re released.” According to Abbott, the funding will be used to enhance and improve training and infrastructure, and will not add staff or non-sustainable programs.

The WDOC will partner with DWS on this grant to assist inmates with job placement and tracking post release to determine success.

The grant provides that the monies will allow the department to:

* pay for training and infrastructure
* purchase necessary curriculum and programs
* implement Microsoft Office Computer Certification programs
* provide Career Readiness Certificate testing for inmates
* provide access to the Wyoming at Work website so inmates can sign up prior to release and utilize the tools available on the website
* provide funds to provide staff training and professional development
* help staff develop relationships with workforce personnel and potential employers
* help staff learn current techniques for working with this inmate population

Education managers work as a team even though they serve individual institutions, so that as inmates move through the WDOC system they can continue their education and not get stalled in the process. All Education Managers and ABE instructors are certified academic positions, certified at the same level that is required in the public school system for K-12.

“I couldn’t ask for a better staff,” says Abbott. “Everyone works hard, approaches new challenges, is innovative, and always has the inmates’ needs in mind.”

The population served by the grant will be:

* WDOC incarcerated unemployed adult job seekers within 1-6 months of release
* WDOC incarcerated job seekers in need of a GED
* WDOC incarcerated English as a Second Language (ESL) job seekers who need skills to enter the workforce
* WDOC incarcerated veterans in the above categories

jchev Grants, Inmate Education, Wyoming

More than 2 million people are incarcerated in the United States, largely because half, or more, of them return to prison after they get out. Educating prisoners, preparing them for re-entry into society, is one of the best ways to reduce the prison population and the enormous economic and social costs associated with it. Opinions offered by Shannon Ladel Keys, 38, and Everett Rocklin Jackson, 44, are serving life sentences at Ryan Correctional Facility in Detroit (in the Detroit Free Press).

In Michigan, prisons consume $2 billion of the state’s annual general fund. Each prisoner costs $35,000 a year to incarcerate. There’s that much less money for health care, schools and the building and maintenance of our infrastructure. Recidivism also creates more crime victims at the hands of non-rehabilitated repeat offenders.

More than 95% of the state’s nearly 50,000 inmates will eventually get out. Too many — if not taught skills and new ways of thinking — will continue to find a way out through the blur of a crack sack or down the barrel of a gun.

Currently, state and federal efforts to educate prisoners are inadequate. Before 1994, prisoners could use federal Pell grants to pay for college classes. But Congress and the Clinton administration prohibited inmates from receiving the grants, even though prisoners received less than 1% of them.

In Michigan, prisoners are allowed to earn a GED and a certificate in one trade class. These classes create a thirst for higher learning and give many prisoners their first real sense of accomplishment. Unfortunately, their progress wanes when they find the doors to higher learning slammed in their faces.

A few of us have been fortunate to attend a college sociology class at Ryan Correctional Facility through the University of Michigan-Dearborn’s Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program. The Department of Corrections prohibits the use of state money to pay for post-secondary education, but Inside-Out doesn’t cost taxpayers a dime. Comerica and other private donors cover the costs of textbooks and materials. College programs like this not only provide information, but also foster new ways of thinking and promote personal development. The state should provide them as part of its investment in prisoner re-entry.

As Malcolm X said, education is a passport to the future. National studies show that college classes cut recidivism by 30% or more. That would make a pretty good investment for state taxpayers. Are we a nation that rehabilitates and rebuilds those who make mistakes, or are we a nation that believes in revenge above redemption?

jchev Inmate Education, Inmate Programs, Michigan

Prisoners are the best people for getting the disengaged engaged, a roundtable discussion on cutting crime and re-offending held in parliament last week was told. Story reported by epolitix.com.

Discussing one scheme where prisoners teach each other to read David Ahern chief executive of the Shannon trust, said: “They were failed by the educational system, this is the first time that many of them will be giving something back to society.”

The debate, held in association with Perspective and The House Magazine, looked at the how training and skills can dramatically lower the re-offending rate of prisoners.

Perspective chairman Jim Davis explained some of the problems that stop skills training from working effectively:

“Whilst training is available in institutions people often get moved and don’t get to finish the course.”

George Hosking, chief executive of the WAVE Trust, agreed.

“Prisons are judged by the number of people starting programmes; we don’t consider the amount of people who complete them,” he said.

Perspective worked with Project Equal Engage, a regional project focused on providing pre and post-release support for individuals within the prison system intended to reduce prisoner re-offend rates.

Over the six month live period of the trial, 277 beneficiaries of the scheme were released from prison.

According to National Offender Management Service figures, the expected re-offending rate, for this period, was 35 per cent.

This was cut to 6.5 per cent – 18 re-offended instead of the expected 96.

Davis explained how relatively small moves, such as making sure that a prisoner has a bank account upon release, make a big difference and help lower re-offending.

“If you don’t have bank account or a national insurance number then you want get any work and you’ll start to re-offend,” he said.

Lord Ramsbotham, former chief inspector of prisons, said:

“If there was a director of young offenders then these strategies would become common practice.

“The prison service doesn’t have people responsible for each type of prisoner.

“We need someone who will take responsibility and turn good practice into common practice.”

Ahern said some prisons officers can be very reluctant to get involved in education.

“There are times in prisons that are not being used efficiently,” he added.

Alun Michael MP, a member of the justice select committee, spoke about how vital training is.

“Prevention of re-offending should not just be an add on; it needs to be the very core of the prison system,” he said.

The panel discussed ways in which the media and public opinion affect the level of skills training that can take place.

“Labour and the Conservatives don’t campaign for restorative programmes, they just promise to build more prisons,” claimed Liberal Democrat spokesman for justice Lord Thomas of Gresford.

“You’ve got to keep people with you,” said Andrew Turner MP, a member of the public accounts select committee. “People in the street need to feel that they’re being looked after.”

“All parties seem to have been driven by the Daily Mail,” responded Labour’s Julie Morgan MP, a member of the justice select committee.

“Those in power need to take a robust stand,” added Ahern.

“We need to push boundaries; we’ve become a victim of the press.”

There was a general consensus that training and mentoring in professional and life skills was the most effective way of lower re-offending rates in the country.

Nick Perry, unit manager at Feltham Young Offenders institute, spoke of how a training and skills scheme caused a massive drop in violent incidents in the institute.

“We’ve had only two violent incidents since April,” he said.

“That is totally unheard of.”

Concluding the discussion, Christian Guy from the Centre for Social Justice, summed up the debate by stressing the importance of focusing on training in prisons, and the urgent need to have a system in place that allows prisoners progress to be properly tracked.

jchev England & Wales, Inmate Education, Inmate Programs, Re-Entry

Officials at the Lafayette Parish Sheriff’s Office on Monday celebrated the opening of a new multipurpose classroom at its Community Corrections campus. News reported by The Advocate.

The campus, in the old J. Wallace James elementary school, is the setting for educational and employment services and counseling for offenders who otherwise would be incarcerated at the parish jail.

Rob Reardon, director of the Lafayette Parish Correctional Center, said the campus population has doubled in the last year, from around 80 people to about 170, receiving services ranging from substance abuse counseling to GED preparation and testing. Some of the offenders are on home detention, others are work-release inmates.

The classroom will primarily be used for the campus’ successful GED program, which has about 200 people enrolled, said Pam Justice, community corrections manager. To receive a Louisiana high school equivalency diploma, students must pass the General Education Development test.

Justice said they are seeing big increases in the center’s literacy program. Justice said 49 percent of the 199 people enrolled last year in the GED program tested below the fifth-grade level.  “We’re finding that a lot of them cannot even fill out a job application,” Justice said.

Because of the program, she said, there are a number of people now reading at fifth- and sixth-grade levels.

Hunter Beasley, a Lafayette Parish School Board member, attended the ribbon-cutting and praised the work taking place on the campus. “They’ve been very successful this year compared to previous years,” Beasley said. “I think it’s a very good idea and the sheriff is supporting it and putting the resources behind it.”

The campus serves a range of functions, many of which help free up space in LPCC, which is nearly always hovering near or at its capacity of 954 inmates.

Reardon said the classroom was built by inmates at a cost of about $24,000.

jchev Community Corrections, Inmate Education, LA Lafayette Parish

In many ways it was just another day, another class of Wesleyan University, one of the more selective colleges in the Northeast. The topic was multiculturalism in schools. The discussion focused on methods of evaluating the rhetorical skills of various commentators, from Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. to Dinesh D’Souza. Full story, pictures and essays on the New York Times.

One student pored over the text, his glasses perched at the tip of his nose. Another raised his hand again and again, eager to speak. A third lobbed grenades into the discussion. Several worried aloud about their homework, a research paper due in a few weeks.

Unlike other Wesleyan classes, though, each of the students — all men — had numbers like 271013 or 298331 on their khaki shirts. They were, in fact, inmates at the state prison here and all part of a daring, privately financed experiment in higher education that takes murderers and drug dealers and other inmates with histories of serious crime and gives them an opportunity to get an elite college education inside their high-security prison, the Cheshire Correctional Institution.

Though community colleges and others, like Boston University, have long had inmate programs, the two-month-old Wesleyan program is one of a few in the country where the selection process is highly rigorous, where academic potential is the primary criterion and where past criminal conduct, however heinous, is not considered in admission.

Some 120 inmates applied at Cheshire for 19 spots in the program through a process that required them to submit essays on weighty matters like Frantz Fanon’s view that language helped “support the weight of a civilization” or Sigmund Freud’s thoughts on happiness.

The instructors were impressed with Jose Cordero’s answer to one admission question: What figure, past or present, would he like to meet? Mr. Cordero, who is serving 65 years for murder, said he would like to meet the Constitution, since it is a “living” document.

He got a fat envelope, filled with blank paper for his future assignments. The rejected got those dreaded skinny ones.

Next semester, the inmates will study chemistry, biology and politics. This fall, their courses consist of expository writing and Sociology 152, the same introductory course Professor Charles C. Lemert has been teaching to generations of Wesleyan students at its nearby Middletown campus where tuition, room and board cost roughly $51,000.

“My father does college planning,” said Michael Luther, a 23-year-old who has been incarcerated since he was 15, “and a lot of students he recommends for Wesleyan don’t even get in. When he heard I had this opportunity, he was proud.”

On Wednesdays, students from the Wesleyan campus come to the prison for joint discussion groups with the inmates. The prison is a high-security center that houses roughly 1,350 inmates. It is the place where all of Connecticut’s license plates are made, and it offers a variety of other classes beyond the Wesleyan program, though not college level. The motto posted in the school wing reads “Non Sum Qualis Eram,” or “I am not what I once was.”

Indeed, all the inmates in the program have records that speak clearly about their past wrongdoing. The class has six convicted murderers, two convicted drug dealers and a kidnapper. Collectively, the class faces more than 600 years in prison. Several students, in fact, have little prospect of ever using their college credits in a career: prison will be their home for this lifetime.

But many of them speak with pure clarity about the reasons they were drawn to school again: idle curiosity, intellectual interest, a longing to be part of the big conversations of the day, and a desire for self-respect.

“It’s rejuvenating,” said Antonio Rivera, 23, who likes to read history and is less than halfway through a 12-year sentence for drug dealing.

Clyde Meikle, 38, of Hartford is serving a 50-year sentence for fatally shooting a man with whom he tussled over a parking spot. Ten years ago, he earned his high school diploma in prison. He likes to set a positive example for what he calls “the younger cats.”

“For me, it was a self-esteem thing,” he said.

Across the country, colleges faced with shrinking endowments are trying to cut corners, not add programs, and many colleges have given up their inmate education programs in the years since the Clinton administration decided it would no longer subsidize them with Pell grants.

Four years ago, in fact, Wesleyan balked at a proposal to install such a program.

But the university has a long history of civic engagement that traces back to its Methodist roots. It is named after John Wesley, an 18th-century minister who championed prison reform and helping the downtrodden. Two students, Russell Perkins and Molly Birnbaum, who had volunteered in prisons as students, revived the idea last year when they were seniors and figured out a way to finance it.

They obtained nearly $300,000 from the Bard Prison Initiative, a program that already pays to offer Bard College courses in a handful of New York prisons. That should fully pay for Wesleyan’s program for two years and provide partial financing for two more.

“Wesleyan has taken a courageous stand here,” said Max Kenner, the executive director of Bard’s program, who said he is convinced that education is a key tool for reducing recidivism.

How to finance the program over the long term is still under discussion, as is the question of whether an inmate who completes the course work will necessarily receive a Wesleyan degree.

But the instructors insist that the standards are identical — that an A in prison is the same as an A on campus and that the inmates will be entitled to use the university’s career services upon release.

Full story, pictures and essays on the New York Times.

jchev Connecticut, Inmate Education

The Alexander Maconochie jail in Canberra, ACT, Australia, will this week deploy 30 more Ubuntu Linux-based computers for prisoner use after a successful first phase, reports IT News.

Prison PC computers created by  Melbourne consultancy, Cybersource, were deployed in prisoner group areas such as the education centre and the library. A computer will be assigned to each cell block wing for use by prisoners. They will provide limited email and internet access to prisoners filtered using a centrally maintained white and blacklist, an Australian first, Cybersource said. Prisoners may send emails to approved contacts only. Attempts to contact anyone not on the whitelist results in the message being quarantined for inspection by an administrator, Cybersource said.

Andreas Wullen, business and security systems manager for ACT Corrective Services, told iTnews, the centre – from each building down to individual cells – had the infrastructure to run the Linux PCs. But there are no plans to allow prisoners to have PCs in their cells yet. “The issue of privilege is quite complex,” Wullen said. “You would have to be granted the highest of privilege to have a computer in your cell. What we will have is PCs in each wing for common use where prisoners can access controlled email or look at websites that have been approved for viewing.”

The jail has an educational centre with training rooms for classes of 10 to 12 prisoners … “It runs on Ubuntu so we don’t have to deal with operating system and software licenses. The software side of the system is completely free for us,” Wullen said.

But look-and-feel of the user interface was still an important consideration, particularly because the centre provided skills to help prisoners find work on release. “The interface we chose was designed to resemble Windows as closely as possible so when prisoners are released back into the community they are still familiar with where things are in the Microsoft [operating system],” Wullen said …

Cybersource product and services manager Ron Fabre praised the State Government. “A huge thing [in the ACT] is to ensure prisoners are able to slowly reintegrate back into society,” Fabre said. “The ACT is remarkably forward-thinking in that regard because they are trying to rehabilitate prisoners rather than just punish them.”

jakking ACT, Australasia, Australia, INTERNATIONAL, Inmate Education, Inmate Programs, Re-Entry

The following editorial is republished from the Des Moines Register:

It was a disappointment when the Iowa Legislature last year voted to build a new state penitentiary. Given all of Iowa’s other infrastructure needs – from highways to sewers – a major investment in a maximum-security prison should have been low on the list of priorities.

The Legislature has repeatedly increased criminal penalties, which drives increases in the prison population. Given that, lawmakers should first have had a serious discussion of how they could reduce the need for prison capacity before committing future generations to a new, $130.7 million penitentiary.

The decision to build was made, however, so at the very least the state should now exploit this opportunity to rethink how a prison should be designed and operated: If this one lasts as long as the 170-year-old existing penitentiary, Iowa will live with the result for a very long time …

The penitentiary houses those inmates classified as the most violent, the most troublesome and the highest risks of escaping. Many are serving life sentences, but most will eventually return to society. The Department of Corrections has commendable goals for giving them the tools – education, job training, drug and alcohol counseling and mental-health services – to eventually return to productive lives. The new penitentiary should be designed with those goals in mind, not only from the perspective of guards and staff, but from a perspective of rehabilitation.

The overall plan and physical condition of the existing penitentiary could be considered an impediment to criminal rehabilitation: The depressing, at times barbaric, conditions of the penitentiary surely contribute to the dehumanizing effect of prison life. The layout of cells resembles kennels. With guards largely confined in control booths, the opportunity for meaningful and constructive interaction on a human level is limited.

The new prison should dramatically change that atmosphere: It should afford inmates access to daylight, views to the outside, indoor and outdoor exercise facilities and ample space for shops and classrooms for job training, counseling and remedial education.

Since the penitentiary was first established in 1839, it has witnessed numerous movements to try new methods of reforming convicted criminals, from hard labor to severe discipline, designed to change criminal behavior. Planning a new penitentiary offers opportunity to experiment, again, with prison reform.   The new prison still will be an institution for confining the toughest criminal convicts, but the state should never lose sight of the idea that these men are capable of change. The new prison should reflect that optimism.

jakking Drug Treatment & Diversion, Inmate Education, Inmate Programs, Iowa, Jail and Prison Construction

Lawmakers took a major step Monday toward overhauling the way prisoners in Utah learn while locked up. This report from the Salt Lake Tribune.

The State House, in a 68-3 vote, passed HB100 — a bill that would force inmates to pay for their own schooling, even if it means taking out loans. The bill also would give the Department of Corrections more control over programs offered to state prisoners.  The measure is based on the belief that educated prisoners are less likely to land back behind bars after they’re released.

Utah’s higher education system has been directing prison education, using about $900,000 generated annually by a fee prisoners and their families pay for using phones in the lock-up facilities … Corrections officials argue they are better in touch with prisoners’ needs and should control inmates’ educations rather than be notified of what changes will come each year. And they want to refocus prison education on vocational programs rather than degrees. That, officials say, would better prepare inmates to land jobs when they are released from prison and enable them to pay back their loans while helping to fund future inmates’ educations.

jakking Inmate Education, Utah