Inmate Education Is Found To Lower Risk of New Arrest
By TAMAR LEWIN - November 16, 2001
Inmates who receive schooling -- through vocational training or classes at the high school or college level -- are far less likely to return to prison within three years of their release, according to a study for the Department of Education.
The study, which followed more than 3,000 prisoners in Maryland, Minnesota and Ohio, found that three years after their release, 22 percent of the prisoners who had taken classes returned to prison, compared with 31 percent of the released prisoners who had not attended school while behind bars.
''The public safety question, the reduction in crime is very important,'' said Stephen J. Steurer of the Correctional Education Association, the lead author on the study. ''But there are also real financial savings. We found that for every dollar you spend on education, you save two dollars by avoiding the cost of re-incarceration.''
Some education officials said they hoped the study, to be released next week, would help build a consensus that prison education was worthwhile.
''We knew before this report that education would reduce recidivism, but we never quantified it before,'' said Nancy Grasnick, the Maryland superintendent of schools. ''A study like this is just going to strengthen, so much, the notion that it is in society's best interest, both morally and financially, that these individuals get an education.''
A second study, which will also be released next week, found even greater benefits among women who took college classes offered at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, New York's only maximum-security prison for women.
According to that study, by the Open Society Institute, a philanthropy backed by George Soros, fewer than 8 percent of the former inmates who attended college classes in prison returned to prison after three years, compared with almost 30 percent of the women who had not participated in the college program.
While the three-state study looked at all prisoners to be released in a given period, the Bedford Hills study compared a group of women who had taken college classes to a group that had not, leaving open the possibility that the results were due, at least in part, to self-selection, with the women most motivated to avoid reincarceration being the ones who took the college classes.
Michelle Fine, a City University of New York Graduate Center professor who directed the Bedford Hills study, said that while self-selection might have played a role most of the women who had the educational background to be eligible for the college classes participated, so the program was not limited to the most motivated inmates.
''There are other factors, too,'' Ms. Fine said. ''One is that women have lower recidivism rates in general. Another is that while study after study finds that any kind of education reduces recidivism, higher education might have more impact than vocational education.''
But as a political matter, even if college classes in prison yield the best results, it remains difficult to get public financing for such classes.
In 1994, when politicians nationwide were trying to show they were tough on crime, Congress passed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, making people convicted of felonies ineligible for Pell grants, the federal tuition assistance for the poor. Prison education accounted for less than 1 percent of the Pell grant budget.
But since then, under the Higher Education Act's Grants for Youthful Offenders program, the federal government has begun providing about $17 million for post secondary education, mostly vocational, for inmates under 25 with less than five years to serve.
Educational opportunities for inmates vary widely by state, with half or fewer prisoners getting some form of education in most states -- and, increasingly, waiting lists of others who want classes.
But recently, there has been a growing consensus among liberals and conservatives alike that educating inmates leads to better outcomes when they leave prison.
''I'd like to see people taking classes, working and developing skills while they're in prison,'' said Krista Kafer, a senior policy analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation. ''I think it's consistent with being tough on crime. And while they're in there, just sitting around is not helping them to get the skills they need once they get out.''
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/16/us/inmate-education-is-found-to-lower-risk-of-new-arrest.html