Education and Its Effects on Recidivism

Ana Cristina Cielo

ENG 106 – G1

Dr. Benjamin Bogart

2 May 2018

Education and Its Effects on Recidivism

Let’s start with facts:  a meta-analysis conducted in 2013 by the RAND Corporation, together with the Department of Justice, found that prisoners who participated in correctional education programs had 43 percent lower odds of going back to prison (hereinafter called recidivism) than those who did not (Smith).  So it would seem an obvious choice and decision to have as many educational programs, in particular college courses, to a captive audience with nothing else but time on their hands. According to the Prison Studies Project, the ability to participate in these courses leads to a reduction in violence for the incarcerated person because they are able to feel human again.  Education is a human right (Smith).  Prisoners have had everything material, and most times emotional and psychological, taken away from them:  their dignity, their self-respect, their modesty; they have been mortified (Kerman).  But the one thing that they can keep theirs, is their intellect, their mind.  And how best than to challenge them with access to education; the vast majority of people in U.S. prisons do not have a high school diploma (Smith).   I will argue in this paper that educational programs in prison can only lead to reduced recidivism, eventually creating more productive members of society that will make positive contributions, unlike their lives prior to incarceration.  

Most prisoners, when they arrive at their “home” for the duration of their sentence, have very little or no life skills, much less an education.  According to Kaufman, the fundamental purpose of education is to develop habits that will create well-being (Hill 2).  As I mentioned in my introduction, a prisoner experiences a stripping of who they are, not just physically but emotionally.  Providing access to betterment programs such as E4C, gives the inmate a certain sense of humanity that he lost when he entered those doors – or he may have even lost that sense of self pride even before that.  Anonymous writes in his paper that his contact with the volunteers of E4C was his only reminder that he was a human (4).  When we regain a sense of our humanity in relation to ourselves, and consequently to others, we tend to act in less negative and destructive ways (Crab).  Crab, my prison pen pal, said that he felt reward, self-worth and value when I would take note of the snippets of his life that he would share.  He said that in prison no one “cares if you live or die” but that our communication is a very small way made him feel like I cared.  And this is all because a FREE (to DCI) program, staffed by volunteers has been offered to these gentlemen, giving them some kind of access to the world they left behind, with their families, responsibilities and yes, as Crab said, the “drugs and gangs that put me here”.