America is doing a poor job of rehabilitating incarcerated individuals who find themselves trapped in a never-ending cycle of release, re-offense, and re-incarceration back into our nation's jails and prisons. Corrections budgets are exploding because effective ways to educate and rehabilitate inmates range from short supply to non-existent.
One in four American adults has a criminal record of some kind, and data shows that America has an extremely high recidivism rate. As a result, states’ corrections expenditures have more than quadrupled since 1980.
Fortunately, data consistently shows that education drastically reduces the likelihood that an inmate will re-offend and return to jail or prison. For example, when inmates receive vocational training, the recidivism rate drops to approximately 30 percent. With an Associate’s Degree, recidivism drops to 13.7 percent, and with a Bachelor’s degree, it drops to 5.6 percent. Once an inmate has a Master’s Degree it’s not even statically significant enough to count as one percent.
It’s clear that education has a direct impact on reducing recidivism, which in turn can save taxpayers billions. It costs approximately $30,000 annually dollars to house the average inmate.
That means for every 100 released inmates we keep from coming back in to the system, it saves the average state three million dollars. Another study found that every dollar spent on inmate education reduces costs of recidivism between four and five dollars down the line. We should be looking at making an initial investment in bettering the education and workforce development skills of every inmate, not only to help the rehabilitation of these individuals but because we know it will reduce taxpayer costs on the back end.
In fact, education alone is the greatest determining factor towards reducing the number of incarcerated individuals. It’s well documented by the RAND Corporation that inmates who participate in education programs while incarcerated have a 43 percent lower chance of recidivating than those who did not have access to such programs. The same study indicated that inmates who participate in educational programs have 13 percent better odds of landing a job after their release.
Without an education, there is an increased likelihood that a former offender will return to prison within the next three years from the time he or she is released. A National Institute of Justice study found that within three years of release, about two-thirds or 67.8 percent of released prisoners recidivated, and this cycle ultimately burdens the American taxpayer.
There are companies in the U.S. with the resources, technology and market reach to enable secure, corrections-grade educational content delivery to every single inmate.
For example, collaboration and video conferencing solutions allow inmates to connect with qualified instructors that can provide the education and guidance needed to help individuals be successful when they are released. Individual devices can even be configured to allow inmates to access educational training programs themselves. Embracing this capability would serve a duel objective of better preparing inmates for successful, productive lives outside prison and the technologies would save employees time and money in the long run.
However, taxpayers tend to be turned off when they realize that it costs money to support these types of inmate education programs. But we need to focus on the bigger picture. The bottom line is, if we invest in education, we save money in the long run. We should be changing the way we rehabilitate our inmates and introduce educational tools into prisons that will reduce recidivism rates at an unprecedented level.
Where do I see this going in five to ten years? I could see many inmates having tablets to do continuing education and increasing the number of inmates that emerge from prison with a degree. Modern technology allows us to make the changes necessary to reduce recidivism and it’s an investment worth making.
Thomas Mott Osborne, an industrialist and former mayor of Auburn, New York, spent a week in NY State’s Auburn prison as prisoner Tom Brown, #33,333x in 1912. He lived as other prisoners did and left that harrowing experience committed to the goal of turning America's prisons from "human scrap heaps into human repair shops."
Committed to the ideal of a criminal justice system that "restores to society the largest number of intelligent, forceful, honest citizens," Mr. Osborne went on to become a progressive warden at New York’s Sing Sing prison, where the majority of his prisoners did not return to prison after release. That was 1912. What has American society done since to improve that vision?
We have the technology and the time to fulfill that vision is now.