College for Convicts
A massive expansion of the Pell Grant program for prisoners goes into effect next month.
AP (“Thousands more prisoners across the US will get free college paid for by the government“):
Thousands of prisoners throughout the United States get their college degrees behind bars, most of them paid for by the federal Pell Grant program, which offers the neediest undergraduates tuition aid that they don’t have to repay.
That program is about to expand exponentially next month, giving about 30,000 more students behind bars some $130 million in financial aid per year.
This is a classic case where my instinct and intellect conflict. Rationally, it makes sense to educate prisoners, particularly younger ones, who will one day be released and, hopefully, become productive citizens. Viscerally, it seems wrong to reward people for their transgressions against the community. Most folks have to save money, take out loans, or both to afford to send their kids to college. And their tax money is going to sending criminals to college? Where’s the justice in that?
But it’s hard to argue with this:
The new rules, which overturn a 1994 ban on Pell Grants for prisoners, begin to address decades of policy during the “tough on crime” 1970s-2000 that brought about mass incarceration and stark racial disparities in the nation’s 1.9 million prison population.
For prisoners who get their college degrees, including those at Folsom State Prison who got grants during an experimental period that started in 2016, it can be the difference between walking free with a life ahead and ending up back behind bars. Finding a job is difficult with a criminal conviction, and a college degree is an advantage former prisoners desperately need.
[…]
Consider this: It costs roughly $106,000 per year to incarcerate one adult in California.
It costs about $20,000 to educate a prisoner with a bachelor’s degree program through the Transforming Outcomes Project at Sacramento State, or TOPSS.
If a prisoner paroles with a degree, never reoffends, gets a job earning a good salary and pays taxes, then the expansion of prison education shouldn’t be a hard sell, said David Zuckerman, the project’s interim director.
“I would say that return on investment is better than anything I’ve ever invested in,” Zuckerman said.
I’d like to see the numbers on this. Are those who get degrees in prison markedly less likely to re-offend? Do they in fact get better jobs and thus pay back the investment in taxes? (Granted, this would be a challenging study, in that the sort of inmate who manages to complete a college degree may well be an outlier.)
Not shockingly, the politics of this are fraught:
The 1990s saw imprisonment rates for Black and Hispanic Americans triple between 1970 and 2000. The rate doubled for white Americans in the same time span.
The ban on Pell Grants for prisoners caused the hundreds of college-in-prison programs that existed in the 1970s and 1980s to go almost entirely extinct by the late nineties.
Congress voted to lift the ban in 2020, and since then about 200 Pell-eligible college programs in 48 states, Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico have been running, like the one at Folsom. Now, the floodgates will open, allowing any college that wants to utilize Pell Grant funding to serve incarcerated students to apply and, if approved, launch their program.
President Joe Biden has strongly supported giving Pell Grants to prisoners in recent years. It’s a turnaround – the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, championed by the former Delaware senator, was what barred prisoners from getting Pell Grants in the first place. Biden has since said he didn’t agree with that part of the compromise legislation.
[…]
College-in-prison programs aren’t perfect. Many prisons barely have enough room to accommodate the few educational and rehabilitation programs that already exist. Prisons will have to figure out how to make space and get the technology to help students succeed.
Racial imbalances in prison college enrollment and completion rates are also a growing concern for advocates. People of color make up a disproportionate segment of the U.S. prison population. Yet white students were enrolled in college programs at a percentage higher than their portion of the overall prison population, according to a six-year Vera Institute of Justice study of Pell Grant experimental programs in prison.
Black and Hispanic students were enrolled by eight and 15 percentage points below their prison population, respectively.
Prisoners with a record of good behavior get preference for the rehabilitative and prison college programs. Black and Hispanic prisoners are more likely to face discipline.
“If you’re tying discipline to college access, then … those folks are not going to have as much access,” said Margaret diZerega, who directs the Vera Institute’s Unlocking Potential initiative, which is focused on expanding college in prison.
“Let’s get them into college and set them on a different trajectory.”
It’s not yet clear if the Pell Grant expansion will grow or narrow the racial disparities. The U.S. Department of Education did not respond to the AP’s inquiry on this issue before publication.
“For America to be a country of second chances, we must uphold education’s promise of a better life for people who’ve been impacted by the criminal justice system,” U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in a written statement to the AP.
Pell Grants will “provide meaningful opportunities for redemption and rehabilitation, reduce recidivism rates, and empower incarcerated people to build brighter futures for themselves, their families, and our communities,” Cardona said.
At the end of the day, $130 million is a rounding error in the Federal budget. If this helps rehabilitate a significant number of offenders, it’s likely a worthwhile investment. Then again, we could spend that $130 million educating people who aren’t convicted criminals.
We can continue to warehouse people in prison and suffer staggering recidivism rates for those released, or try a different approach. Warehousing and recidivism have huge costs, liberals will mentioned the social costs, while conservatives are now only now coming to terms with the budgetary costs. Given that a large percentage of those imprisoned lack a high school diploma and are likely to be illiterate, their success in finding jobs, after prison is small. Anything that helps the former prisoner have some financial success will help in keeping them out of jail.
Let’s not pretend that giving $130m in Pell grants to prisoners means that there’s no more money for anybody else. That’s simply a choice. (As a percentage of the federal budget, it’s an absolutely meaningless number.)
Also, Pell grants are awarded to people with “exceptional financial need.” People in prison get these grants not because they’ve committed crimes but because they’re poor. It’s certainly not a reward for bad behavior.
This is definitely a case where, as you note James, emotion and feelings often trump facts. There is significant evidence to support the efficacy of these programs.
Source: https://sites.northwestern.edu/npep/benefits-of-prison-education/
Likewise Rand has findings along the same line:
https://justiceandopportunity.org/policy-advocacy/mapping-the-landscape-of-higher-education-in-nys-prisons/
I will try to write more on this later. The reality is if we want to deal with our mass incarceration problem we have to be willing to let go of a moral and punitive impulse that we have been acculturated into.
@Sleeping Dog: That’s my rational instinct as well but I would like to see evidence that it actually works.
@drj: Given that we simply spend without regard to revenue, I suppose we can spend an infinite amount of money on anything. But we’ve passed a budget with $130 million for Pell Grants for prisoners. Presumably, if we lined that out, there would be an appetite for $130 million elsewhere.
There are a lot of poor people who aren’t in prison, no? You’d think they would be first in line.
@mattbernius: We were commenting at the same time. That’s useful! Thanks.
Is there some sort of control in these studies? That is, how do we disaggregate selection effects? My instinct is that those who get degrees while in prison are different in other ways from those who don’t. Were they less likely to re-offend to begin with?
@James Joyner: FWIW, I get the emotional disconnect. I have been there as well (especially coming off age in the 90’s).
This just happened to be a great example of a wealth of data proving the program efficacy running into our cultural desire to punish rather than rehabilitate (and then getting upset about the long term societal costs about that policy decision).
@James Joyner:
Great question. Need to run out, but will write more on this later.
@James Joyner:
But then the discussion shifts from not wanting to reward bad behavior (“Viscerally, it seems wrong to reward people for their transgressions against the community.”) – which seems reasonable – to who is more morally worthy to receive a government benefit.
I’m sure you wouldn’t like where that’s going if the government could also morally judge non-poor people. Then it might hit a bit closer to home.
We punish people by fining or incarcerating them (as specified in applicable criminal codes), not by deliberately taking away educational opportunities.
James- I like studies and controls as much or more than the next guy, but in this case I am not sure it makes much difference, assuming I understand the situation correctly. My understanding is that prisoners have to want to sign up for these courses. If that is true then of course you have selection bias but does it matter? If someone is interested enough to sign up and stick to it enough to get a degree we save money and those people have better lives. My one caveat would be age. IIRC recidivism decreases with age so if this is just a function of being older that should be easy to ferret out. Differences are so large it’s unlikely.
Steve
We like to pretend that part of the reason for prison is to rehabilitate. Well, education strikes me as the best possible route to that end.
And next we need to stop punishing convicts after they have served their time and give them their right to vote back and not block them from getting jobs.
Another thought: people are absolutely terrible with big numbers.
Sounds like a big deal, no?
$130m = 0.0000209677% of the $6.2T federal budget. It’s not even a rounding error. It’s pretty insane that Congress should even have time for this stuff, let alone that the politics are “fraught.”
$130m is approximately 39 cents per US resident per year. People are really going to feel this in their wallets. Such an injustice!
And yet another thought:
Not so long ago, when it was revealed that Alito engaged in clearly corrupt behavior: “Well, technically he didn’t break any rules.”
“Bad” poor person might get something for free to the eventual benefit of society as a whole: “Let me clutch my pearls.”
It’s telling that the thing that might cost you a buck or so every year is viscerally upsetting, while the other thing, that could potentially fuck over everyone in the country, is no biggie.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Why would we do that? They have shown themselves to be morally bankrupt. They forfeited their right to basic freedoms by committing crimes. I mean nobody forced them to do dirt. Sure, they served their statutory punishment. But that doesn’t mean it should infringe on our rights to shun them and limit their opportunities to better themselves. If I wanted to cede those things to the government, I would have signed that social contract I heard so much about during my “education”. But I didn’t sign it so I can do whatever I want to whoever I want.
As the formerly brilliant Jeff Sessions said “Good people don’t smoke marijuana.” and once a person goes bad, they can never ever ever ever become good.
Nature tells you that just like it tells you there are two genders–penis and vagina. Have you ever seen a rotten apple turn back into a fresh, shiny one? Didn’t think so.
Stop indoctrinating the children who are actually adults but are still our children and children are the future. I weep for that future.
@James Joyner:
Or it’s not an either/or question so a queue shouldn’t even exist.
Or that the best inquiry to make before we get to that question should be why there are so many poor people who lack affordable access to 20th century services. (not a typo.)
Or maybe if there was universal access to those basic services, we wouldn’t need to expend so many resources on the various parts of the criminal justice system. It’s not merely a moral question. Nor is it only about upholding the rule of law, something the CJ system doesn’t exactly do all that well beyond the rehabilitation/punishment question anyway.
Those basic services are required for a free market and democratic governance.
And of course, there are the various private businesses who incorporate servicing that justice system into their business models. It’s not as if their business success could possibly afford them an outsized role in policymaking.
@Kurtz:
That, dare I say, is the cherry on that sundae.
@James Joyner:
I haven’t been able to dig into the reports to speak about the control issues (here’s the Rand report: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR266.html; I’ve yet to find the specific BJS report referenced).
Generally speaking, as others have pointed out, it’s hard to have controls in these quant-based meta-studies. I understand your point that “self starters/self advocates” are more likely to be successful. At the same time, reentry is really, really difficult to transition back into communities. Jobs for people with a High School Degree tend to be very limited. So, for even “self-advocates” the journey is really tough (especially with a lot of unskilled labor that takes people with criminal records being very low-pay and hard to get).
The difference between leaving incarceration with no degree (basically then focused on construction or food services) versus having a associate’s or bachelor’s degree (or even a trade certification) is huge.
All that said, it will be interesting to see the impact of this in a few years (and the degree to which background checks still remain an issue–they were not as impactful during the 90’s when Prison Pell Grants were last a thing).
@Kurtz:
Re: JJ.
You can take the man out of the institution, but you cannot take the institutionalism out of the man.
Don’t get me wrong, he’s a pretty good dude, really good dude, and adept at reacting to people’s correcting nudges, but his first reaction is starry eyed 50s styled institutional idealism. The individual should bend to the crowd for the greater good.
That’s his ingrained first take. But he is truly willing to take a true second look after objections.
But the first take is predictable: how dare these outliers object to this system many great people created?
Better be careful with this line of thought: there’s a solution here, where we are both doing the right thing for prisoners AND not treating prisoners better than everyone else, but it would get people on the right to start screaming “socialism!” at the tops of their lungs.
I’m talking, of course, about socialism.
Baby socialism. Petite Socialism. A little touch of socialism on the side.
Making Pell Grants universal. I was going to add that they should be expanded to include trade school, but a quick google suggests that this happened already.
@steve:
Correct. Most of those studies see “older” as 45+ (sob!).
I’ll also call out that the value of college education programs in prison goes beyond just helping lower recidivism rates for younger folks who are released. There are data that people involved in these programs are less likely to exhibit behavioral problems within correctional facilities. That leads to fewer injuries to both prisoners and staff, and fewer charges related to confinement (which end up extending people’s sentences).
Rather than tackling these points head-on, especially because there are no easy answers to them, I want to share one of the more intriguing programs privately funded prison education programs I heard of. It was designed in part by women incarcerated in a correctional facility (in Connecticut if memory serves).
They ultimately advocated for a fund that supplied educational grants for three interrelated groups of people (all of whom, in most cases, were coming from poverty):
– Prisoners (and their children)
– Their victims (and their children)
– Correctional officers (and their children)
The incarcerated women recognized themselves as being part of an ecosystem and felt that simply focusing on them failed to address the broader intersectionality that helped create and perpetuate the conditions for crime. Including victims (in cases where there was one) made sense in taking steps to address communal harm. The correctional officers part was also really important because they recognized that in many communities, the prison is the only major industry that remains and correctional officers are often under significant financial stress as well. In fact, one of the largest lobbying groups against sentencing reform are Correctional Worker unions because of the existential threat that decarceration creates for their communities.
I have yet to do a deep look into that program. However, I think the underlying approach makes sense for disarming many of the moral critiques we often hear about these programs.
@drj: I think we need ethics reform for SCOTUS to avoid the appearance of impropriety. Having rich dudes wine and dine Justices at the level we’ve seen with Thomas and Alito just looks bad. Do I think they’re voting differently because they’re getting free vacations? No.
Regardless, I don’t know what one has to do with the other. There’s a genuine disconnect between working families struggling to send their kids to college (or the kids taking out loans that may take decades to pay off) and giving the same thing out for free to convicted criminals. Indeed, they’re essentially getting the GI Bill. “Thank you for your disservice!”
@Kurtz: @Gustopher: @de stijl: I’m not inherently opposed to free universal college access, although countries that make college free or very cheap tend to track students early, reserving college for the very most talented. But I’m evaluating the program against the baseline of our existing system, which makes pretty much everyone pay for it.
Dr. Joiner thanks for this thread and your views on this particularly difficult subject, it is one which I find to be quite important. Please bear with me with a short bit of history before addressing the specific topic. In another lifetime I was caught up in the state system of California, from the late 1970s through the mid 90s. A loosing participant in what was then referred to as “the war on drugs”, now dubiously referred to as the “war on crime” (for obvious political purposes as we learn more about the medical component of drug addiction).
Because of this I got a glimpse of radical changes in corrections that created alot of political hay at that time with a very large social cost passed down to future taxpayers that make up a majority today.
During my time in the system all forms of rehabilitation was done away with. This was due to the gargantuan costs of changing from a system of rehabilitation with educational programs and more importantly job programs to an ever expanding warehousing program with a broader and broader mandate that also grew to include the mentality ill. Originally there was a parole board system to monitor said rehabilitation. This changed in the 1970s to a determinate sentencing system where folks were simply warehoused and released back to the streets. This severely limited the scope of those non political folks involved with corrections and rehabilitation, thus greatly increased the political power of District attorneys, and of course both of our major parties. Anything that helps reverse this imo a step in the right direction to increasing our true prosperity
“Most folks have to save money, take out loans, or both to afford to send their kids to college.”
This points to an issue that is egregious and imo deserves serious discussion in its own thread.
As to the topic of investing resources to rehabilitate our large prison population, I don’t see why we have to abandon other groups, such as the working poor who weren’t convicted of a crime to do this. I would first look at our obsession with constantly stimulating the supply side of our economy or vast defense spending before looking at other less fortunate groups as to how to pay such a comparatively modest sum.
While I would venture that job programs and shorter sentences or even diversion programs for non violent offenders would get more bang for the buck for prisoners with release dates, access to higher education seem to be also win for just about everyone.
“At the end of the day, $130 million is a rounding error in the Federal budget. If this helps rehabilitate a significant number of offenders, it’s likely a worthwhile investment.”
Well said, I couldn’t agree with you more
Then again, we could spend that $130 million educating people who aren’t convicted criminals.
Also well said, but I would suggest a different 130 million, also another 130 million to help our returning veterans struggling ptsd ect ect ect. One of the beautiful things about our flawed financial system, is that we don’t have to create losers to tackle social issues that plague the less fortunate.
@James Joyner:
It has to do with what one sees as the bigger threat to the principles of a fair society. That was the point of your post, no?
Speaking of injustices and violations of the social contract, which is objectively the more meaningful one: a) extending a means-tested program to include the currently incarcerated (at an annual cost of approximately 39c per resident); or b) openly corrupt behavior by members of the highest court in the land?
There can only be one serious answer to that question.
Which is to say that there is no point in even trying to discuss justice and fairness if you can’t get past the knee-jerk reaction that those with power should always be given the benefit of the doubt, while simultaneously being eager to extend harshness beyond what the law demands to those who have none.
@James Joyner:
A mindless knee-jerk reaction if ever I saw one. (Thanks for helping me make my point, I guess.)
Even apart from the fact that the educational benefits under the GI Bill or not means-tested (contrary to Pell grants), $130m for 30,000 incarcerated students adds up to approximately $4300 per student annually.
That’s pretty fucking far from “essentially getting the GI Bill,” which grants a maximum of 36 monthly payments of (on average) $1800 at a college of your choice.
Maybe, just maybe, we put too many people in prison in the first place. And when we do imprison them we do nothing to help them change their path to the better.
We are by far and away, by leaps and bounds, the advanced western democracy that incarcerates the most folks numerically and by population percentage. It’s not even close. We outmatch China an pop percentage, our closest rival in this particular arena. And when we incarcerate them we stick them in a box for their term and do not even try to redirect their energy. The very nature of our prison system encourages future criminality.
Why is our recidivism rate so lousy? We ensure it by bad core policy decisions.
If other countries are substantially better at something than we are, it is in our best interest to pay attention and learn.
@James Joyner:
Does giving a favorable Justice a lifestyle beyond the means of the job help ensure that they don’t retire and go into private practice? Does it make them more likely to push for your interests in conference and sway a wavering Justice? Does it affect the opinions?
There’s a lot more than just their own final votes.
Also, who paid off Kavanaugh’s debts? Does it have anything to do with his hard right turn on the court?
@drj:
Psst. Dr. Joyner recognizes it as a knee jerk reaction. It’s going to take some time before he slides into support for the Socialist Revolution and becomes the Comrade Joyner we all know he was meant to be.
“If you can only solve 10% of the problem, is this the right 10%?” is a fair question, although I think it should always come with “why can we only solve 10% of the problem?”
@James Joyner:
Our current system is bad and does not accomplish its task beyond raw punishment. As a system we are demonstrably worse compared to our peers on every metric. We are failing bad.
When they display graphs of OECD countries vs. the US in this space they have to fudge the y axis with a squiggly line to keep us on the same page. We are that bad at this.
We are exponentially worse at this than all of our peers. We totally suck.
Maybe we could learn from others.
@ImProPer:
There are not enough upvotes for this.
Sure, but conservatives aren’t particularly big on supporting that proposition either. “We couls X…” is simply a “look over there, a squirrel!” diversion most of the time.
I totally agree, if college quality. Meanwhile my neighborhood’s father-son combo (son now 29, father now 44, yup, easy math). They need a GED, college is a farce for these two. I just checked, both still in my state’s correctional facilities. These folks need a GED first. But if we can do 10% on the high end I’m all for it.