by Steven Gledhill, founder and author of FREEdom from MEdom Project
Before my current position working mostly with young people in a psychiatric hospital setting, I worked at the Sheridan Correctional Center in Sheridan, Illinois an hour or so west of Chicago. I did substance abuse counseling there. I saw first-hand the condition of undereducated men who found it necessary to sell drugs or apply their burglary talents to “earn” a living. Since that experience, it has been my position that, more than any other socioeconomic reality, the lack or absence of an education was the primary factor for people finding crime to be the most viable opportunity to come into some money.
I once asked a fifty-something year-old inmate in my therapy group, who’d been locked up for most of thirty years, how much money he made selling drugs on the street. The man told me he likely raked in a million and a half in sales over the staggered twelve year period when he was not in prison. He seemed to take some pride in that. That is until I revealed that I had earned about a million and a half as a professional counselor and other miscellaneous jobs over the same forty year stint in time. The money the man had put away for himself for when he is released from prison was similar to what I had in the bank. He barely had anything left waiting for him.
The inmates in my therapy group began making sense of the reality that a million and a half over some forty years is less than $40,000 a year. Then, when it came to the question of how much money freedom is worth that touched some sensitive nerves for these guys. Even the money they had made didn’t go very far. After fines and legal fees on top of the time they had to serve, there was very little left to show for the blood, sweat and tears—and all of the risk—that went into trying to “growing their business.” (A majority of the men I worked with at medium-security prison had been involved in a stabbing or shooting of some kind, whether they were the villain or the victim.)
Since the Illinois Department of Corrections was intent on getting these men alcohol and drug treatment, as well as the opportunity to earn general education diplomas (GED) and earn college credits taking legitimate college courses, it helped to somewhat soften the blow of what they had lost because of their criminal lifestyle. Education for many of the men there meant the world to them in their efforts to get back to their families and provide for them.
Recidivism is the tendency of a convicted criminal to reoffend; or more specifically, a tendency to relapse into a previous condition or mode of behavior; especially into criminal behavior. In state prisons across the United States, according to the US Bureau of Justice, recidivism occurs at a rate of more than 76.6 percent over five year from inmates release from prison (68 percent within three years). More than three-quarters of inmates released from prison are caught in a criminal lifestyle within five years of their release.
Counseling and education at Illinois prisons, such as the one in Sheridan, have helped to decrease recidivism in the state, which I had heard used to be more than 60 percent. The latest statistics, according to recent reports indicates that Illinois recidivism rates to be just over 45 percent. Recidivism still costs the state’s taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars, to say nothing of the burden borne by crime victims.
Counseling and education of inmates in prisons everywhere is not merely to the advantage of incarcerated people reintegrating into society. It’s a huge advantage to each and every one of us interacting with the rehabilitated men and women in our midst today trying to find their way as they continue to hopefully dispute the belief that crimes does pay. It costs taxpayers substantially less to educate inmates while in the prison system, than what it costs to house them should they return there.
Freedom for the men I worked with was far more than being released from prison. To be set free from prison life could mean transitioning back in to the dilemma the men faced when they once again are required to provide for their families, and be contributing members of their community. Returning to a life of unemployment or gross underemployment would carry with it all of the temptations of the criminal lifestyle. If these men are able to gain college credit while locked up, perhaps they are several steps closer to more gainful employment. Perhaps they are more empowered to experience a higher level of what it truly means to be free to live their lives, with less struggle, and more able to enjoy it.
Below is the article published in the New York Times providing information on educational initiatives for undereducated prison inmates.
Turn Prisons into Colleges
by Elizabeth Hinton, Op-Ed Contributor for the New York Times
Imagine if prisons looked like the grounds of universities. Instead of languishing in cells, incarcerated people sat in classrooms and learned about climate science or poetry — just like college students. Or even with them.
This would be a boon to prisoners across the country, a vast majority of whom do not have a high school diploma. And it could help shrink our prison population. While racial disparities in arrests and convictions are alarming, education level is a far stronger predictor of future incarceration than race.
The idea is rooted in history. In the 1920s, Howard Belding Gill, a criminologist and a Harvard alumnus, developed a college-like community at the Norfolk State Prison Colony in Massachusetts, where he was the superintendent. Prisoners wore normal clothing, participated in cooperative self-government with staff, and took academic courses with instructors from Emerson, Boston University and Harvard. They ran a newspaper, radio show and jazz orchestra, and they had access to an extensive library.
Norfolk had such a good reputation, Malcolm X asked to be transferred there from Charlestown State Prison in Boston so, as he wrote in his petition, he could use “the educational facilities that aren’t in these other institutions.” At Norfolk, “there are many things that I would like to learn that would be of use to me when I regain my freedom.” After Malcolm X’s request was granted, he joined the famous Norfolk Debate Society, through which inmates connected to students at Harvard and other universities.
Researchers from the Bureau of Prisons emulated this model when they created a prison college project in the 1960s. It allowed incarcerated people throughout the country to serve their sentences at a single site, designed like a college campus, and take classes full-time. Although the project was never completed, San Quentin State Prison in California created a scaled-down version with support from the Ford Foundation, and it was one of the few prisons then that offered higher education classes.
Today, only a third of all prisons provide ways for incarcerated people to continue their educations beyond high school. But the San Quentin Prison University Project remains one of the country’s most vibrant educational programs for inmates, so much so President Barack Obama awarded it a National Humanities Medal in 2015 for the quality of its courses.
The idea of expanding educational opportunities to prisoners as a way to reduce recidivism and government spending has again gained momentum. That’s partly because of a study published in 2013 by the right-leaning RAND Corporation showing that inmates who took classes had a 43 percent lower likelihood of recidivism and a 13 percent higher likelihood of getting a job after leaving prison.
Lawmakers have rightly recognized the wisdom in turning prisons into colleges. In 2015, Mr. Obama created the Second Chance Pell Pilot Program, which has enrolled more than 12,000 incarcerated students in higher education programs at 67 different schools. The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions is considering permanently reinstating Pell Grants for incarcerated students, who lost access to federal scholarships under the 1994 crime bill. Even Education Secretary Betsy DeVos calls providing prisoners with the chance to earn a degree “a very good and interesting possibility.”
This is no small matter. If we believe education is a civil right that improves society and increases civic engagement, then the purpose of prison education shouldn’t be about training people to develop marketable skills for the global economy. Instead, learning gives us a different understanding of ourselves and the world around us, and it provides us tools to become more empathetic. That’s why prisons with educational programs are often safer, and why there is a stronger correlation between educational levels and voting than with socioeconomic background.
Mass incarceration is inextricably linked to mass undereducation in America. Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Georgetown, Wesleyan and New York University are among a handful of institutions that realize this and have begun to create ways for incarcerated people to take college classes. These universities recognize that they have a moral responsibility to pursue educational justice for prisoners, a group that has disproportionately attended under-resourced public schools.
College presidents across the country emphasize the importance of “diversity, inclusion and belonging,” and they are reckoning with their institutions’ ties to slavery. Expanding prison education programs would link those two ventures in a forward-thinking way. It’s clear that education will continue to be a central part of criminal justice reform. The question we should ask ourselves is not “Will incarcerated students transform the university?” The better question is, “Will colleges begin to address and reflect the world around them?”
Elizabeth Hinton is an assistant professor in the departments of history and African and African-American studies at Harvard.
