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?

janchavarie 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.

janchavarie 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.

janchavarie 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.

janchavarie 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