Prison Education Reduces Recidivism by Over 40 Percent. Why Aren’t We Funding More of It?

[eridani]

http://www.thenation.com/article/prison-education-reduces-recidivism-by-over-40-percent-why-arent-we-funding-more-of-it/

Prison isn’t the most intellectually stimulating environment, but the dimmest corners of e criminal justice system may actually be a perfect place to liberate an otherwise wasted mind. A new initiative by the White House to issue Pell Grants to incarcerated students is about to test just how truly corrective our so-called corrections system can be.

The plan to extend Pell Grant access in prisons is described as a “limited pilot program” authorized through a federal financial aid waiver program under the Higher Education Act. Incarcerated adults could apply for grants of up to $5,775 for tuition and related expenses, at college-level programs offered in prison facilities nationwide. Designed to allow for studying long-term effects of education on recidivism, the program moves toward restoring access to Pell Grants for incarcerated people, which Congress removed in the mid-1990s.

 College behind bars remains a tough sell to some law-and-order conservatives—hence the charmingly titled counter-legislation, the “Kids Before Cons” Act. Generally, however, the idea of de-carcerating the prison population appeals to an ascendant libertarian streak among Republicans because, in fiscal terms, textbooks and professors yield better returns on investment than weight rooms and laundry duty.

 Though research on prison education is still lacking, studies that have tracked the relationship between recidivism and educational attainment generally point to reduced recidivism and better preparation for transition back into their communities and the workforce upon release (nearly 690,000 people walk out of prisons each year, and several million will mill through local jails). A college degree can help offset the enormous employment barriers formerly incarcerated people typically face.

[dembotoz]

1. corrections is not about rehab it is about inflicting as much pain as they can legally muster

[eridani]

2. If we can't appeal to peoples' morals, maybe a financial appeal will work n/t

[daleanime]

4. Except some seem quite willing to spend the money.....

as long as it hurts certain groups of people.

[Lee-Lee]

3. The two things most lacking in prison

A path to an education that will give viable skills post-prison for employment is one. And it needs to be geared toward jobs a person can actually get hired for out of prison- don't train people for jobs in fields like nursing or anything financial or teaching because their record will likely make getting a job in those fields difficult. Concentrate on fields most accessable to those with records.

And the other is far, far, far expanded access to mental health services that are tied in with community mental health services and the probation system so treatment begins in prison and doesn't stop when they leave.

[davidpdx]

5. There was an article about this a week or two ago

I posted that I support these kinds of ideas. In fact, we should be hiring more college teachers to do this and actually providing benefits to teachers. Most adjunct faculty in the US are under paid and overworked. Schools don't hire full-time, they hire a crap load of adjuncts so they don't have to pay the benefits (and people think Papa John was an asshole, clearly he's not the only one gaming the system). A friend of mine teaches as an adjunct in the US and taught here in Korea for a long time. She's seriously thinking about coming back to get a job here.

[sibelian]

6. To answer the second half of your thread title...

I'm afraid the understanding of the purpose of prison isn't uniform in detail across the populace.

There are several ideas of what prison is for:

1. "They did something bad so something bad should happen to them" - obviously an extremely primitive and childish "mirroring" idea that has its roots in the feeling that people should all have roughly equal levels of positive and negative experiences or life isn't "fair". This idea is produced by the part of the mind that responds to myth and story, it is ubiquitous in all cultures and will never die.

2. "If they're in a cage they're not out here, so we son't have to suffer the effects of their transgressions and will be safer." - probably the original purpose of prison. The only use for prison that really makes any sense.

3. "Having an opportunity to face serious consequences for their transgression will force them to change their personality and they'll no longer be likely to trangress" - deeply suspect idea which on the surface pretends to be rational but actually is driven by the same myth-loving part of the mind that wants revenge, it's just that this time it wants forgiveness.

It's highly sensitive to negotiables - it's almost impossible to demonstrate any clear relationship between the continuing development of the personality in adults and their personal circumstances. If they don't want to follow the rules before being incarcerated and are already aware of the risks of incarceration and have transgressed anyway, why would prison change them? Several factors need to be aligned at once for the proposition to be true:

a. The prisoner has to consider his personality to be a flexible construct that he can choose to change. I distinguish here between "personality" and "actions". This level of self-understanding is often simply assumed and isn't as simple a process as is typically believed at all. Adults are far less likely to be self-critical than children. Adults come in a wide variety of levels of IQ and EQ, (one of my prison psychologist friends made a soul-crushing observation to me once - "there are so many people who just don't seem to get that loads of these guys in jail are justplain THICK&quot and low IQ = low levels of self-understanding. The idea that prison changes people into upstanding citizens is "parent" thinking and it isn't particularly applicable to adults.

b. Society has to "close the deal" - in other words, society has to respond to the reformed convict as if they actually have changed. That cannot be legislated for or guaranteed in any way. The opposite is far more likely. If there's nothing "in it" for the convict, why bother?

c. Prison has to be unpleasant enough to be something people want to avoid. This is an awful mess as there are subsections of the populace whose personal circumstances outside prison are about as bad as being in prison anyway. When one's life is a series of things one has to do, rather than an experience in which one feels one can choose or at least affect what happens to one, what has been lost by being imprisoned? In some cases, prison is an actual improvement, many feel actively relieved at being caged like an animal and abandoning responsibility for themselves, which leads to...

d. The prisoner must feel that his identity is under threat, that the value of his being is in question. This, to me, is possibly the crux of the entire problem of crime, and, in the case of male prisoners (and we may as well consider prison to be a "guy" thing.... the VAST majority of prisoners are male), relates to templates that are socially applicable to men.

If a man of great sensitivity (typically entirely obscured, ignored, delegitimised or openly reviled as "sensitivity" in general is typically not permissible as a male trope) to his social standing, to his level of acceptability to the world, has decided that he just doesn't fit, will never fit, isn't good enough, will never be good enough, can't get anything to work then he will not see that anything has been lost by his incarceration as nothing of any consequence has been incarcerated. It's not just society or his victims he doesn't give a shit about. This is a pre-conscious process and typically unsignified socially. It's also incredibly difficult to change how people feel about themselves, adults in the habit of self-hatred are just as rigid as adults who simply rebuff all criticism.

The validity of the education and rehabilitation of prisoners as a societal tool rests on the acceptability of reason 3 for incarceration, which is a wobbly idea anyway, it needs lots of support to actually work. It does work, but not for rational reasons.

Opponents of education for the incarcerated seem to me to be divided into those who are slobbering around inside reason 1 and those who actively oppose reason 3 on the grounds that it's not particularly rational. They're right. There is no guaranteed logical chain of cause and effect that can lead from education to a new man.

But the point they are missing is that explicitly disallowing the mythological thinking that could free these men from self-hatred does guarantee that the self-hate will be perpetuated.

There's not a textbook process whereby we can show what's happened to a man when he changes from a criminal to a free participant in societal norms. We can only listen to him. And much of the time, we will feel that his transgression precludes our listening to him.

Society has to close the deal. It has to feel that these men are worth something and behave as if they are.

And men, if they don't get past certain other social threshholds which are not related to crime aren't actually perceived to be worth very much at all.

[eridani]

7. Given that education cuts recidivism, society partially closes the deal, right? n/t

[sibelian]

9. In fact, that's the only acceptable evidence of the deal being closed

...from OUR perspective, i.e. clearly we're seeing criminals abandoning the criminal "identity", so they must be getting their side of the "bargain".

From the ex-con's perspective it's a completely different matter - we don't get to know what counts to him as external evidence of his acceptability to society without his telling us. Having a job, being a father, being a trusted employee, all sorts of symbolic processes which are replacements for crime are meaningful to us but for him it might well be much simpler things like people taking him seriously in conversations, people feeling sorry for him for the bad things that have happened to him, people telling him the truth, people believing him when he tells the truth, people helping him, people being grateful for his help. We who have never been caged take so many of these things for granted. Ex-cons still live in a box when they're released from prison, and if the things he thinks should close the deal remain outside his box...

The absence of normal social interaction is incredibly damaging to the human psyche. It's much more dangerous than people realise. It doesn't matter how intelligent the pariah is, or how strong-willed, or how skilled they are at managing their own responses, internally and externally, to the failure of society to feed back on their behaviour in wholesome ways, if he is cast out the damage is still done.

A lot of the time the things that we will tell such a man he should value are things that yield gains for us if he values them at our demand, success, financial security, friends, a family... These are things that we want.

If he has had a life where these structures have been damaged or their value delegitimised he will have his own ideas about what constitutes good feedback from the rest of us on his worth and it will very often be entirely ordinary things he can see that other people get that elude him in one way or another, and we often don't notice or explicitly don't care whether or not he gets them. If he's had a damaging family background (which is incredibly common in convicts) then his understanding of his worth very often going to be supported by incredibly basic things like having some faith that the people around him won't want to beat him up or steal things from him. That's some steps below being a father or having a job.

We need to be careful in closing the deal, he has to believe us when we tell him he's become "one of us", so we have to be telling the truth.

Education doesn't do that. All it does is provide a hoop for him to jump through that makes it likely that we'll end up considering him acceptable. This will not be lost on him. It's us telling him what feedback he should anticipate and accept as positive, which in and of itself doesn't close the deal.

That being said, I can't think of any better way of approaching the shift in dynamic necessary to provide the space for him to change. It's about managing the environment so that certain outcomes are more likely. If we set a test for him, which I think is the real reason we're doing the education thing, several things happen (which you will, of course, already know, but I want to set them out as much for clarifying my own thoughts as anything else, please forgive the brain dump of obvious ideas...):

1. We give him a chance to be believed. Not to pass the test or to be better educated, but something much more primal - we construct a process in which he can behave as if he wants to be accepted and we can believe that he does, i.e. trust. I think that's actually much more important than the education itself. The knowledge gained becomes the overtly signified reward for his allowing us to test him and make judgements of his worth, but the real reward is us believing that he wants to change which is a step towards closing the deal.

2. It sets up a relationship where he is subordinate to an authority figure and this relationship isn't poisonous. As I'm sure you'll already know, many convicts have terrible mechanisms for dealing with the concept of authority, and it's typically because of appallingly abusive authority figures in their past. If subordination has cost them rather than yielded gains for them or social structures in which they have found themselves previously, the concept of authority itself is damaged. This isn't normal in ordinary human society and providing them with a mechanism whereby they can re-map their reactions to the concept not only symbolises their reconnection to society but also provides an arena within which they can consider their self-worth openly and safely. Where self worth is connected to employment, family or other kinds of personal development these structures usually include material consequences for the convict, sometimes very serious consequences, as do the social systems within a prison, where everything is all about "respect" and violence is common. In an educational environment, you can fail and the only real consequence is that you failed... and then the authority figure can help which, again, is a step towards closing the deal.

3. He will find himself in a place where he is allowed not to know things. This is really important! Loads of these guys grow up in environments where the emphasis on personal status is unbelievably intense. His actions become divorced from his status (unless his fellow convicts sneer at his efforts...). The student is not less than the teacher.

Etc, etc, blah blah. You knew all that. EVERYBODY already knows ALL of that.

Anyhow, I'm strongly behind the idea that the knowledge gained through education of the incarcerated is clearly of value but in conjunction with the personal processes through which it is gained it acquires far more value.

The thing that amazes me about arguments against education for convicts is that they seem to stem from astonishingly cartoonish ideas about what convicts actually are. Everyone wants them to be moustache-twirling evil types that tie damsels to railtracks.

The opposition to education for convicts stems from idiotic bloody-minded resentment. It's typically extremely self-absorbed and rests on grubby, slithering "how-come-he-gets-STUFF-and-not-me" or "we're REWARDING him for being EVIL" type thinking.

I support education for the incarcerated wholeheartedly. I also acknowledge the reasoning behind arguments against it, but I think the reasoning is incomplete and also mistaking the goal of such education for simple, woolly liberal "concern".

It's true that only the convict can change himself, but it's also true that it's not just him that might prevent this. Sealing him into the "box of shame" and then just kicking him out at the end of his sentence is pretty much guaranteed to set him up for further trouble, and, if nothing else, we will end up paying the price for that with him, again.

To me and you and everyone else on this board all these things are, of course, incredibly obvious, sorry if I'm making you read too much. I guess I saw your response as an opportunity to put it all out there...

[djean111]

8. The short answer is that those prisons are meant to be kept at an agreed-upon occupancy.

Most private prison contracts even have a clause that says if the municipality (or whatever) does not provide them with enough head count, the municipality will pay the difference - if the private prison is guaranteed an amount per head, basing that on, say, 95% occupancy, and the municipality only provides enough prisoners to give them 85% occupancy, the municipality must pay the private prison as much as they would have if the occupancy rate was met.

"Reduced recidivism" is no longer the goal, profit is the goal. This is why there is such push-back against ending the war on drugs or marijuana legalization. This is why illegal immigrants are shunted into prisons immediately, if possible.
Law enforcement is no longer a service, it is a business.

[Johnny2X2X]

10. Bingo

We can debate all we want about what ideally would help prisoners and help society, but prisons aren't in the business of helping prisoners, society, or even victims, they now exist to turn a profit. The more Right Wing the state, the more obvious this profit motive is. Laws, sentences, and probation are applied with one goal in mind, to maximize profit for the corporations running the prisons, courts, and probation agencies. And in many cases your sentence and other punishment is fed into an algorithm whose purpose is to maximize the profit of each prisoner. For example, prisoner A comes from a family with money, it might be a good idea to fine this prisoner heavily and then give them a long and costly probation. Prisoner B comes from poverty, slap them with a long sentence and collect the money from the government to house them for years, in the mean time that prisoner can work forced labor for next to no money to further pad the bottom line.

The US Prison Industrial Complex is the biggest threat to freedom in the entire world. It needs to end and the profit motive needs to be removed from the process all together.