Turn Prisons Into Colleges

[Independent voter]

Leftists are always complaining about the amount of prisoners we have.

With distance learning, why not offer them college?

Most likely the prisoners who take college courses decided beforehand to better their lives, getting the prisoners who care nothing about college to sign up is the challenge.




https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/06/o...education.html

Imagine if prisons looked like the grounds of universities. Instead of languishing in cells, incarcerated people sat in classrooms and learned about climate science or poetry — just like college students. Or even with them.

This would be a boon to prisoners across the country, a vast majority of whom do not have a high school diploma. And it could help shrink our prison population. While racial disparities in arrests and convictions are alarming, education level is a far stronger predictor of future incarceration than race.

The idea is rooted in history. In the 1920s, Howard Belding Gill, a criminologist and a Harvard alumnus, developed a college-like community at the Norfolk State Prison Colony in Massachusetts, where he was the superintendent. Prisoners wore normal clothing, participated in cooperative self-government with staff, and took academic courses with instructors from Emerson, Boston University and Harvard. They ran a newspaper, radio show and jazz orchestra, and they had access to an extensive library.

Norfolk had such a good reputation, Malcolm X asked to be transferred there from Charlestown State Prison in Boston so, as he wrote in his petition, he could use “the educational facilities that aren’t in these other institutions.” At Norfolk, “there are many things that I would like to learn that would be of use to me when I regain my freedom.” After Malcolm X’s request was granted, he joined the famous Norfolk Debate Society, through which inmates connected to students at Harvard and other universities.

Researchers from the Bureau of Prisons emulated this model when they created a prison college project in the 1960s. It allowed incarcerated people throughout the country to serve their sentences at a single site, designed like a college campus, and take classes full-time. Although the project was never completed, San Quentin State Prison in California created a scaled-down version with support from the Ford Foundation, and it was one of the few prisons then that offered higher education classes.

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Today, only a third of all prisons provide ways for incarcerated people to continue their educations beyond high school. But the San Quentin Prison University Project remains one of the country’s most vibrant educational programs for inmates, so much so President Barack Obama awarded it a National Humanities Medal in 2015 for the quality of its courses.

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RECENT COMMENTS
Judith Vander Woude 2 days ago
Thank you for a thoughtful contribution. I heartily agree with the concept. Calvin College, a small private liberal arts college in Grand...

Greg Stec 2 days ago
Yeah Liz, I have a bridge for sale, please call me.

Noel Liner 2 days ago
Thinking back to the incredible effort, discipline and focus it took me to get into and then through university, I find the entire thesis of...

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The idea of expanding educational opportunities to prisoners as a way to reduce recidivism and government spending has again gained momentum. That’s partly because of a study published in 2013 by the right-leaning RAND Corporation showing that inmates who took classes had a 43 percent lower likelihood of recidivism and a 13 percent higher likelihood of getting a job after leaving prison.

Lawmakers have rightly recognized the wisdom in turning prisons into colleges. In 2015, Mr. Obama created the Second Chance Pell Pilot Program, which has enrolled more than 12,000 incarcerated students in higher education programs at 67 different schools. The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions is considering permanently reinstating Pell Grants for incarcerated students, who lost access to federal scholarships under the 1994 crime bill. Even Education Secretary Betsy DeVos calls providing prisoners with the chance to earn a degree “a very good and interesting possibility.”

This is no small matter. If we believe education is a civil right that improves society and increases civic engagement, then the purpose of prison education shouldn’t be about training people to develop marketable skills for the global economy. Instead, learning gives us a different understanding of ourselves and the world around us, and it provides us tools to become more empathetic. That’s why prisons with educational programs are often safer, and why there is a stronger correlation between educational levels and voting than with socioeconomic background.

Mass incarceration is inextricably linked to mass undereducation in America. Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Georgetown, Wesleyan and New York University are among a handful of institutions that realize this and have begun to create ways for incarcerated people to take college classes. These universities recognize that they have a moral responsibility to pursue educational justice for prisoners, a group that has disproportionately attended under-resourced public schools.

College presidents across the country emphasize the importance of “diversity, inclusion and belonging,” and they are reckoning with their institutions’ ties to slavery. Expanding prison education programs would link those two ventures in a forward-thinking way. It’s clear that education will continue to be a central part of criminal justice reform. The question we should ask ourselves is not “Will incarcerated students transform the university?” The better question is, “Will colleges begin to address and reflect the world around them?”

[Jonnusthegreat]

Why not? We already spend more on prisoners than we do public education students.

[Dhi]

something new for ppl that want to go to college to think about, debt or criminal record....

[chazus]

So, at a time where students can't afford education as it is, teachers don't get paid enough... We want to give education to inmates. Remind me again, where the money comes from, and why it would go there instead of to the people who are already trying to do that?

I think education is great, but I also enjoy a good fiction book too.

[Liftinmammals]

Sweet! A prisoner could go to college free, but I'd have to give my soul and life's savings for a crack at better education. Sounds cool! I guess the best way for free college would be to either be poor or do crime. No middle ground for the other people. I love my country...

[Azadina]

So instead of forking out 500k, just rob some places and get free education in prison. Why rob places? Well, if you don't get caught for all of them, then there's extra profit for you.

[Azadina]

Sounds good to me.

I really like this new Liberal idea where we help literally everyone EXCEPT for average law-abiding citizens.

Jewelry stores better watch out with this idea

[Themius]

So instead of forking out 500k, just rob some places and get free education in prison. Why rob places? Well, if you don't get caught for all of them, then there's extra profit for you.

What school is 500k

[Crissi]

For all the sarcastic replies, how is trying to rehab prisoners through education a bad thing? It's like y'all are missing the forest for the trees, which is reducing crime rate.

[Super Kami Dende]

For all the sarcastic replies, how is trying to rehab prisoners through education a bad thing? It's like y'all are missing the forest for the trees, which is reducing crime rate.

Or turning them into Supersmart SuperVillains. Imagine all those Lex Luthors just waiting for an Education.

Heresy I say, Heresy.

Jokes aside: If Money is to be spent on Education, offer it to people who aren't criminals first.

[Nasuuna]

For all the sarcastic replies, how is trying to rehab prisoners through education a bad thing? It's like y'all are missing the forest for the trees, which is reducing crime rate.

To expand on this

Community college is like 800 bucks a class, not exactly a wallet buster.

[Doctor Funkenstein]

For all the sarcastic replies, how is trying to rehab prisoners through education a bad thing?

The point is that it's not a good thing, either, and there's much better things to spend the money on than those who have proven themselves criminals. Especially since giving someone an education isn't "rehab."

When determining how to benefit your citizens, criminals should always be at the lowest rung of the ladder. They deserve to be where they are in the vast, vast, vast majority of cases. (In before you try vomiting up some outlier examples to the contrary.)

[Crissi]

The point is that it's not a good thing, either, and there's much better things to spend the money on than those who have proven themselves criminals. Especially since giving someone an education isn't "rehab."

When determining how to benefit your citizens, criminals should always be at the lowest rung of the ladder. They deserve to be where they are in the vast, vast, vast majority of cases. (In before you try vomiting up some outlier examples to the contrary.)

Except the best way to benefit your citizens is to lower crime rate, and helping criminals get jobs to lower recidivism is a big part of that. You ignore that, you just end up making more victims later.

[Azadina]

What school is 500k

Little googling around seems to indicate that some get MD after having masters. Latter with some more googling is said to wary from 8k to 120k per year. But let's take 120k. What's that total to? Now add in 4 years of 57.2k a year for the MD.

Think we got there and then some.

[Crissi]

It's not, but giving prisoners things that even normal citizens aren't entitled to is a little fucked. So one has to ask themselves if it is actually a punishment the lower down the economic chain you go.

Regular people don't have to deal with a criminal record that turns most employers off. That's the trade off.

[Doctor Funkenstein]

Except the best way to benefit your citizens is to lower crime rate, and helping criminals get jobs to lower recidivism is a big part of that. You ignore that, you just end up making more victims later.

You don't need a college education to get a job.

Answer this: You have two people. One is a proven criminal, one is an upstanding citizen. Which of those two most deserve to have the government pay for a college education?

Go on, try and say it's the criminal. I fucking dare you.

[Crissi]

Little googling around seems to indicate that some get MD after having masters. Latter with some more googling is said to wary from 8k to 120k per year. But let's take 120k. What's that total to? Now add in 4 years of 57.2k a year for the MD.

Think we got there and then some.

That's for the extremely bright. The average kid will be fine with state school at 60k for 4 years. Or CC for like 10k

- - - Updated - - -

You don't need a college education to get a job.

Answer this: You have two people. One is a proven criminal, one is an upstanding citizen. Which of those two most deserve to have the government pay for a college education?

Go on, try and say it's the criminal. I fucking dare you.

Ok. I'd hire the criminal, as it benefits society more to keep them from getting in trouble.

Also education tends to reduce criminality.

[Themius]

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-1...merica-2014-11

60k *4 years.. 240k... what am i missing?

Also seems retarded to compare it to those instead of say... state schools.

[cubby]

Leftists are always complaining about the amount of prisoners we have.

With distance learning, why not offer them college?

Most likely the prisoners who take college courses decided beforehand to better their lives, getting the prisoners who care nothing about college to sign up is the challenge.

A lot of european prisons do something like this - with an insanely low recidivism rate. And I could not agree more with the sentiment. However, at least for the foreseeable future, where our "leaders" own stock in private prisons, and the vast majority of presidential supporters feel that if they had it hard, so should the next generation (along with being violently against anyone not white), it won't happen - and might even more farther away from this idea.

But it's a great idea.

Turn prisons into places of learning and fixing whatever was wrong with a person that got them into trouble in the first place (if it's possible of course). Make better citizens of those that fuck up, or just never had a chance.

But that kind of culture shift would take a monumental effort. And right now, the U.S. is still advocating for a treasonous being-sued-by-a-porn-star "president". So we'll have to wait until better angels come into power.

My guess, not to jump entirely off topic, is when climate change starts really kicking our asses, globally, we'll see the kind of major culture shift that would be capable of fixing this particular problem.

[Crissi]

A criminal record isn't nearly as much of a stigma as a felony record is, so this trade off isn't really as big of a deal as you think it is.

And after a few generations of all criminals being educated, that stigma probably goes away mostly anyways, and then we are stuck in a situation where being a criminal is actually a legitimate way to climb the economic ladder which is insane.

You'd think so, but we got a whole lot of pearl clutchers here. "You used to do drugs? OFF WITH YOUR HEAD"