Giving Compass' Take:
- Jamin Sewell examines research suggesting that improving higher education access in prison helps reduce violence and recidivism rates.
- How can funders support increased access to higher education programs for incarcerated people?
- Learn more about key issues in criminal justice and how you can help.
- Search our Guide to Good for nonprofits focused on criminal justice in your area.
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In the past several years, the closures of small- to medium-sized colleges like Nyack College and The College of Saint Rose have brought an extremely high level of disruption and stress to students and faculty, who were given little or no warning. When a prison with a college program closes, students face these same issues — but they do not have parents and college administrators to help guide them through the process of transferring to another program to ensure they have continued higher education access in prison.
Students in prison college programs must rely on the carceral system to transfer them to another facility with a college program. And they must depend on an outside college provider, whom they cannot access directly, to ensure that credits are transferred to and accepted by the new program.
New York announced recently that it would be closing two maximum-security prisons, including Sullivan Correctional Facility in Fallsburg. I have taught undergraduate classes in legal studies at Sullivan for the past four years in a bachelor’s program, a partnership between St. Thomas Aquinas College and Hudson Link for Higher Education in Prison. While it is a cause for celebration that the prison population rate in New York has decreased by 54% since 1999, allowing for another round of prison closures, the end of Sullivan's successful prison higher education program is not because of the impact of higher education access in prison.
A RAND Corporation metanalysis of correctional education found that individuals who participated in college programs were half as likely to recidivate as those who did not. This represents a 13 percentage point reduction in their risk of recidivating three years after being released from prison with higher education access in prison. The students that have graduated from a Hudson Link program have a less than 2% recidivism rate. Another study estimated that prison college programs increase the odds of employment by 20.7%, yield a return on investment of 124.39% and will yield $16,908 in benefits, which is $6,441 net of costs. These studies have concluded that the main driver of cost savings is from the low rate of recidivism among individuals who complete college prison programs. There’s also the impact these individuals have on their communities after their release from prison, where many graduates find work in the “helping professions.”
Read the full article about higher education access in prison by Jamin Sewell at Times Union.