Pubdate: Tue, 16 Feb 2016
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2016 The New York Times Company
Contact: http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/lettertoeditor.html
Website: http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298

A COLLEGE EDUCATION FOR PRISONERS

States are finally backing away from the draconian sentencing 
policies that swept the country at the end of the last century, 
driving up prison costs and sending too many people to jail for too 
long, often for nonviolent offenses. Many are now trying to turn 
around the prison juggernaut by steering drug addicts into treatment 
instead of jail and retooling parole systems that once sent people 
back to prison for technical violations.

But the most effective way to keep people out of prison once they 
leave is to give them jobs skills that make them marketable 
employees. That, in turn, means restarting prison education programs 
that were shuttered beginning in the 1990s, when federal and state 
legislators cut funding to show how tough they were on crime.

President Obama pointed the country in the right direction last year 
by creating a pilot program that will allow a limited number of 
inmates to receive federal Pell Grants to take college courses behind 
bars. The program will include colleges that either run prison 
education programs or want to start them. So far, more than 200 
schools in 47 states have expressed interest.

Not all states are interested in breaking with the failed policies of 
the past. In New York, for example, raucous opposition in the 
Legislature led Gov. Andrew Cuomo to withdraw a sensible 2014 
proposal that would have set aside a mere $1 million in a state 
corrections budget of $2.8 billion to finance college education 
programs behind bars. Know-nothings in the Legislature argued that 
the proposal was "a slap in the face" to law-abiding taxpayers, when 
in fact it represented a clear cost savings for those same taxpayers.

New Yorkers pay about $60,000 per inmate per year - a considerable 
burden given that 40 percent of those who are released return within 
three years, most for economically driven crimes. But inmates who 
attend privately financed college classes before release fare much 
better. A prison education program created by Bard College in 2001 
boasts a remarkable recidivism rate of 4 percent for inmates who 
merely participated in the program and 2.5 percent for those who 
earned degrees in prison. In addition, research has shown that the 
public saves $4 to $5 in reimprisonment costs for every $1 it spends 
on prison education.

New York lawmakers who should have jumped at the governor's proposal 
ridiculed it instead. Mr. Cuomo has devised a new plan - paid for 
partly with private funds - that does not require legislative 
approval. But such funding is unreliable and probably unsustainable 
over the long run. Moreover, the case for full public financing of 
prison education is stronger than it has ever been.

That case is laid out in a sweeping new report by the prison re-entry 
committee of the New York State Bar Association. The report notes 
that the number of college programs in the state's prisons fell from 
70 in the early 1990s, before state and federal financing streams 
were cut, to just four in 2004. The number of college degrees awarded 
to inmates fell from 1,078 in 1991 to 141 in 2011. At a time when a 
college degree is the basic price of admission to the information 
economy, more than 40 percent of inmates lack a high school diploma. 
The report calls on the state to expand vocational and academic 
programs in prison to better prepare people for life and work after release.

The bar association report calls on all colleges in New York to 
refrain from using criminal history information in admissions, which 
has been shown to have virtually no value in predicting lawbreaking 
on campus. Applicants who check "yes" are now pushed into a 
supplementary application process that costs them more money and 
often asks them to produce court and legal documents that do not exist.

Nineteen states and 100 cities and counties prohibit public agencies 
- - and in some cases, private employers - from asking applicants about 
criminal convictions until later in the process, when they have had a 
fair chance to prove their qualifications. The New York State Bar 
Association wisely calls for colleges to take that same prudent 
approach in the interest of giving qualified former inmates a better 
chance at a college education.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom