Salon Magazine: Graham Kates- 'Re-Inventing College For Prisons'

Source:Salon Magazine- some say prison is an education in of itself.

"Two ex-inmates are trying to bring higher education to the incarcerated, one maximum security facility at a time. 

At the height of the tough-on-crime era in the mid-1990s, prisoners in New York State seeking access to college-level courses were dealt a one-two punch that seemed to deliver a crushing blow to inmate higher education.

When then-President Bill Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act in 1994, he revoked inmate access to federal Pell grants. In 1995, New York Governor George Pataki followed suit, eliminating Tuition Assistance Program (TAP) funding for prisoners in the state.

For Kathy Boudin, at the time an inmate of the maximum security Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women, it seemed like college programs “disappeared overnight.”

“When college was removed, instead of having a line of people walking to school, we had people sitting up in the day rooms playing cards, playing dominoes, getting in fights,” said Boudin, now the director of the Columbia University School of Social Work’s Criminal Justice Initiative." 

From Salon Magazine

Because of the fact that we have such a high level of prison inmates going back to prison after they are released and in a lot of cases within a year of getting out of prison the previous time and in a lot of cases because they simply don't have the skills that they need to be successful legally on the outside, which means that society, meaning taxpayers get stuck with the bills of having to take care of these people while they are in prison and then, get stuck with the bills of having to pay for them while they are back in prison, because these inmates enter prison as criminals and leave prison as criminals, screw ups going in and screw ups going out and coming back in, knowing all of these things, you would think that society would get the message that there's a better way in how we could incarcerate our prison population then having them remain uneducated screw ups who repeat their same mistakes from the past that landed them in prison in the first place.

Some say that funding education and schools for prison inmates costs money and of course they are right. Anything worth doing does. But done well, it's cheaper to pay for that then funding things that aren't worth doing. Like inmates to remain criminals while in prison with no hope of making it on the outside once they leave prison and end up coming back to prison and once again being wards of the state. Which is exactly what prison inmates are: adult children who can't make it on their own and can't be taken care of by anyone and must live in an institutional environment to be able to function at all. 

If we give prison inmates the opportunity to improve themselves with skills that they can use once they leave prison, (something like 7-10 inmates leave prison while they are still young and healthy enough to work) so instead of having no hope of making it on the outside, we could empower them to get the skills so they can become productive citizens.

We could fund education for prison inmates through things like Pell grants and student loans that they would pay back while either still in prison or once they are out of prison. And also by putting inmates to work in prison with what's called prison industries, which would be companies that operate inside of prison that would hire inmates. And pay our inmates for the work that they do to cover their room and board. But it's just a matter of priorities, what we believe we should fund in this country.