The scene it sets is of a collegial environment of highly motivated people who yearn to learn, and would commit themselves to pursuing a college degree, but for lack of access.
In reality, a large swath of the incarcerated population is not motivated to pursue additional education, or really any program that might help them get their lives back on track.
Part of it is because they frequently have underlying mental-health problems, addictions, learning disorders, or intellectual disabilities that often go undiagnosed or untreated in prison, and that must be addressed before they can get clear-headed enough to pursue their GED, let alone a college degree. Or they see a high-school or college diploma as pointless, either because they know the deck's stacked against them, or they don't know any other way of living.
So, it may be completely true that higher education is correlated with lower rates of recidivism, but that doesn't mean that increasing access to education _causes_ lower recidivism.
Rather, it likely means that people who are able and motivated to pursue higher education have lower rates and lower severities of mental-health issues or learning disorders, and a lack of those underlying issues predicts lower recidivism.
Peers matter. If you stick a dumb kid who screwed up in a prison full of hardened career criminals, you're likely going to get a career criminal. Surround him with other dumb kids trying to figure out how to recover from their mistakes and something different can happen. A separate prison college serves this purpose well too.
I'd be happy to be involved in such a project.
Maybe your point is valid for some state prisons, but in my experience it is not that true.
During my state incarceration in Alaska, the education directors had me develop and teach computer classes. There were waiting lists of inmates who wanted to take them. I taught basic computer knowledge (hardware and operating systems), Office program usage (Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Access), and VB.NET programming.
I tried to get the University of Alaska to allow me to take some courses by correspondence, but they were not interested. All I could do was get one of the math professors to send me a few dated textbooks.
In the federal prison system, there were Vocational Training classes that were always full. I took the V.T. Drafting course in one and then tutored it. That class taught 4 months of board drafting and then 6 months of AutoCAD. It had about 45 students enrolled all the time. Sadly, I discovered on release that drafting is no longer a profession due to the new modelling packages that enable engineers to lay out their drawings nearly instantly. However, I can still read blueprints, and can whip one up in a jiffy when a customer needs one for a shed they want to buy from me.
There were no options for college classes in the federal system without having some wealth to pay for them.
Hans Reiser would likely never kill another person in his life if he was free. If he could have full access to a computer he would have likely continued to learn and build things. Instead we dump him with the rest of the dregs of society together into a broken system who's main role is retribution, which IMO is a human instinct we should fight against not codify.
It seems a lot like the public school system in it's general lack of differentiation in regards to inputs(prisoners). In terms of a learning system, it's diverged.
Why not? He killed one already for no good reason. His high IQ just means he has less of an excuse. It doesn't make him a better person.
He murdered his wife, hid the body, lied and denied it vigorously in court, was found guilty of premeditated (first degree) murder, and bargained it down to second degree murder charges by showing the police where he buried her body. I think a life sentence is reasonable for that.
You seriously think that he wouldn't kill again if his next wife or lover "betrayed him" in his mind? If you feel that way, why don't we just give his children a pass to murder him because he took their mother from them?
>If he could have full access to a computer he would have likely continued to learn and build things. Instead we dump him with the rest of the dregs of society
He murdered his wife, a crime to which he freely plead guilty. He is the dregs of society.
You’re really one for the common man, huh?
In all seriousness though, whether or not Reisner would be a productive member of society if released, isn’t the right thing to do to focus first on identifying and freeing people on death row who are wrongfully convicted? And, if we are speaking of justice, nonviolent offenders in prison because of draconian drug laws? And then after that get around to violent offenders whose chance of recidivism is low?
This is the key. I really don't believe punishment works. I'm on mobile at the moment so it would be tedious to find sources, but I will do so later when I have time.
But a great example for this is with parenting. A child doesn't learn why changing their behavior is beneficial to them outside the context of punishment if punishment is used. They simply learn to hide the behavior, because it is the punishment itself that provides the negative feedback. Showing the child why a specific behavior is detrimental to them gives them negative feedback about the behavior itself. One of the best ways to show this to children is by appealing to their empathy. "Would you like it if X did that to you?" That's a simplistic example.
But in education, the examples are numerous. And for reasons that may be obvious prisoners won't necessarily be in education for say, a math degree, but they would be taking courses in history and philosophy, and the like. Humanities courses give the perspective that crime-affected communities often lack. And they give hope and possibility by exploring all the realms of human thought
Incarceration is inhumane. It does not work. How can someone possibly have hope for changing their behavior when they are treated like an animal in a cage? it does nothing for reinforcement since their freedom after a served sentence is likely to entail returning to a broken community.
> It has been thought that the purpose of punishment is to reform the criminal; that it is to deter the criminal and others from committing similar crimes; and that it is retribution. Few would now maintain that the first of these purposes was the only one. If it were, every prisoner should be released as soon as it appears clear that he will never repeat his offence, and if he is incurable he should not be punished at all. Of course it would be hard to reconcile the punishment of death with this doctrine.
> The main struggle lies between the other two. On the one side is the notion that there is a mystic bond between wrong and punishment; on the other, that the infliction of pain is only a means to an end. Hegel, one of the great expounders of the former view, puts it, in his quasi mathematical form, that, wrong being the negation of right, punishment is the negation of that negation, or retribution. Thus the punishment must be equal, in the sense of proportionate to the crime, because its only function is to destroy it. Others, without this logical apparatus, are content to rely upon a felt necessity that suffering should follow wrong-doing.
It goes on from here in great depth. Recidivism as a metric of the effectiveness of prison is not misguided, per se, but is not sufficient. The deterrent effect of imprisonment is hard to measure; the punishment aspect is impossible to measure.
I agree, on a purely subjective basis, that we have tilted way too far in the direction of retribution and deterrence, to the point where we have maxed effectiveness as a deterrent, and have more than satisfied the "blood lust" of the victims of the crime (that is, reducing vigilantism and private retribution to a non-factor).
[1] http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2449/2449-h/2449-h.htm#link2H...
But -- some percent of the population are predatory, or have the potential to become predatory. They have come to believe that the strong (them) have the right to take from the weak. They steal, rob, rape, murder because it benefits themselves to do so. And if you take away any prospect of bad consequences, more people will become predators.
I also think our current prison system is a pretty awful. But if you take it away, what would you do with criminals instead? What do you do with the 20 year old man who robs someone at gunpoint, or drags a woman into an alley and rapes her? I think there are alternatives out there, but IMO they must involve punishment (to deter others) and containment/supervision (to prevent the criminal from preying upon others again). My own preference for punishing something like armed robbery would be something like a sentence of 10 years of doing farm labor followed by a three year gradual reintegration into society.
And if you leave the consequences.... they become CEO's.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/09/13/1-in-5-ceos-are-...
This premise is false. People have gotten along without the present distorted system of mass incarceration, not having a system of punishment doesn't itself produce predators. Social norms are quite powerful by themselves. The present system needs to be wholesale re-evaluated for its fairness and effectiveness at producing people that don't reoffend.
At the moment it exists, structurally, to create a labor force that can be forced to work for free, effectively continuing the practice of slavery in this country. This systematized role disproportionately affects communities of color, unsurprisingly, in line with the historical victims of the practice.
>What do you do with the 20 year old man who robs someone at gunpoint, or drags a woman into an alley and rapes her?
Well, at the moment we let them out after 90 days if they're on the swim team at Stanford.
https://www.cnn.com/2016/09/02/us/brock-turner-release-jail/...
If I were treated like an animal in a cage, I sure as hell would not like to go back to prison again.
Destigmatizing a criminal record when it comes to hiring (or anything else for that matter) would help a lot, but the government doesn't seem too interested in helping out with that (though I hope the current low unemployment rates help in this regard). Prison education programs would also help. If the government is going to lock people in little boxes with other criminals, stigmatize them for the rest of their lives, and seriously contend the point of it is to reduce recidivism, they need to be doing this sort of education at the very least.
But the opposite is true for most re offending criminals. Their freedom from the cage thrusts them into another cage. There is no point in not committing crime, especially if you are part of a gang. The gang affords you power and a kind of familial bond to other people.
Some of it goes against your instincts, but the results speak for themselves.
There is a lot of research on punishment showing that it only works to increase the motivation to not get caught. It in no way influences the reasons behind criminal/illegal behavior. Otherwise no one would ever get a second parking or speeding ticket or a dui.
Having prisons be run as colleges is better for society than having prisons run as plantations.
In 2018, high quality online education is close to free. Coursera, edux, udemy are just some of the examples.
But I believe the argument is that the way prison/punishment is structured right now makes reintegration into society difficult, and as a result is ineffective.
I definitely try to be progressive about it, and for victimless crimes 100% rehabilitation and learning, but If a loved one or me was a victim, it would be difficult to watch them taking humanities courses.
what we would like to do with the 'guilty'? what would sit right? this is not the question we should be asking about a flawed system as we can never be sure who is guilty.
Instead take a look at someone innocent, your daughter, wife, your son; And ask what you would be willing to put them through if it was their turn to be the innocent people imprisoned? i'm sure the list would be short, the necessities, remove; freedom? ok. But access to education? entertainment? social interaction? protection? What would sit right with you knowing that your loved ones risked this existence every day?
This is the reason i hate the death penalty, forced labour, solitary, and all inhuman, cruel and dehumanizing things that our prisons employ.. These things don't protect us, they exist only due to vindictiveness; And they ignore the inevitability of mistakes.
For a vast, huge majority of victims of crime by far and way the most valuable thing to them is not retribution or vindication, it is their own attempt to regain safety. The knowledge their assailant is no longer able to hurt others is so much more substantial on average to victims than the knowledge their assailant is suffering or dead.
Retribution is a tart feeling. Its empty. It gives you a moment of animal hormone rush before you realize it isn't gaining anyone anything. Its just part of being angry.
Yes, of course if you were involved in a crime, or someone you loved, you would want retribution. We all would feel that way. Our brains are wired too strongly to react in that manner. Its a survival instinct, one of those deeply rooted behaviors you cannot undo like the gag or drowning reflexes. That is why it is so valuable that those of us not under its influence recognize it doesn't serve a practical purpose in civilized society. You retaliate to save your life from an immediate threat, and you use that instinctual bloodlust to insure the threat is neutralized. You don't channel it to use state institutions to harm people long term to appease your animal brain in the same way you don't guzzle cheese wiz all the time because your brain keeps telling you to eat so long as food is available. We have that instinct, both to eat endlessly and be sedentary and to seek retribution. Neither are rational, and both require discipline to restrain, not glorify.
Anyways, I moved to tech bc it seemed like the easiest place to get a decent paying job w/ said conviction. I'm a white, well-spoken, intelligent and motivated male with a great family and support structure, connections, etc. and for me it is/was/will be incredibly difficult to overcome, so I can just imagine what it's like for less (attractive?) candidates. I will work my way into the position where I can take the extra risk involved in hiring people with criminal records if they are otherwise good cantidates, bc I've been through it.
Providing prison education is pivotal to helping the recidivism rate, as is promoting attitude changes toward hiring criminals. (the ones who got caught)
I don't necessarily disagree with nixing arrests for personal amounts / use of Marijuana, even the "I sold my buddy a dime bag worth that one time," but once we get into serious commercial activity is it not valid to keep those particular convictions?
May God have mercy on your soul.
If we are going to expect felons to reform and get a job and support themselves using legal means, well we have to make sure they have at least some opportunity at doing so.
Seems we could have thousands MOOCs available on non internet connected computers. These inmates should spend their time reflecting, studying, and working.
Who wants to spent another $35k a year when they get locked up again, instead providing them with near free education that might help them not come back to prison?
These days, a background check is a $10 service on a website. A felony conviction is now pretty much economic ruin. The only loopholes left are working as your own business, like hairdressers that rent space at a salon or day labor for under-the-table cash.
The other narrative is that for $10 bucks I can protect myself, my family, and my business from terrible people.
Whether they are terrible or “misguided” is up to me to decide, as it is whether to employ them or not.
Again, not everybody in jail deserves humane treatment. There are animals in there. Maybe you have never been on the other end of crime, but there are humans who are animals.
This really would be a game changer for these individuals and the costs could be marginal given a Chromebook is <$150 and Khan Academy could provide bulk discounts.
Latest on Khan Academy: https://www.ted.com/talks/sal_khan_let_s_teach_for_mastery_n...
There seem to be trials of the offline Version of Khan Academy (KALite) at a correctional facility in Idaho and Los Angelos: https://www.khanacademy.org/resources/out-of-school-time-pro...
Has anyone published a whitelist of educational web sites? Wouldn't be a bad idea. Could make it a collaborative effort, too, by versioning it with GitHub and accepting online pull requests with public discussion.
The prison-industrial complex and their political pawns.
If we had a legal system that resulted in prisoners improving themselves during incarceration, it'd be much harder to justify that. But if a business has a choice between two candidate employees, one who's been in prison for a couple of years, and another who hasn't, then (all else being equal), which candidate do you think they're more likely to hire?
Taken another way, how would you improve prison to make prison time seem like less of a risk factor, or even as a positive thing?
Wouldn’t you want to know the background of a person before hiring a nanny for your child?
Now change nanny to employee and child to business.
Of course, these are the more capable people in the first place. Most people in prison are too stupid for college. A much better solution is to limit college education to a fixed single digit percentage of the population so it can't be used as an expensive arms race of a signaling mechanism by everybody else.
[citation needed] on this incredibly inflammatory comment. Yes, people tend to end up in prison after a chain of bad decisions, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're unintelligent to the point of being incapable of learning things.
Arguably, a successful drug dealer has far more real-world experience in economics than a college grad on the topic.
The majority of people in general are too stupid for college, and criminals that get caught tend to lean towards the dumb end.
Agreed, this is probably true for our current definition of "college"
> A much better solution is to limit college education to a fixed single digit percentage of the population so it can't be used as an expensive arms race of a signaling mechanism by everybody else.
Holy shit, that's a galaxy brain take. I agree that college status signaling is out of control, but doing this would just move the signaling elsewhere. Also it would be a bit fascist IMO.
Anyway, upvoted for interestingness.
Missed the /s, I'm assuming.
"Students who find themselves in prisons, jails, and correctional facilities have varied and intermittent educational backgrounds. Correctional facilities can use Khan Academy to support a variety of programs, including credit recovery, GED preparation, and adult continuing education. These facilities tend to be high-security environments with extremely limited Internet connectivity, if any.
Idaho Correctional Facilities - KA Lite, an offline version of Khan Academy, is impacting learners in the Idaho Department of Correction. The first 20 prisoners using Khan Academy exercises offline all passed the math portion of their GED course—the first time that had ever happened."
KA-Lite seems to be maintained by the Learning Equality organization:
https://learningequality.org/about/
"In the summer of 2012, our co-founder Jamie Alexandre was interning at Khan Academy when he and a fellow intern had the idea to bring Khan Academy offline using a low-cost Raspberry Pi."
https://learningequality.org/kolibri/ "Kolibri makes high quality education technology available in low-resource communities such as rural schools, refugee camps, orphanages, non-formal school systems, and prison systems."
Suppose you're fresh out of prison with no good employment options. My guess is that, when people talk about recidivism rates, that either look at it nominally or they try to control for socioeconomic status. But apart from socioeconomic status, I can see two major factors that might cause recidivism: 1) the personality that led you to end up in prison in the first place, and 2) the effect on your personality that your time in prison had.
Since the only way to study the personality of the prisoner population is to do so _after_ they go to prison, it seems impossible to isolate either effect. Maybe there's a clever study design that let's you do it.
Failing that though, it's sort of dishonest to assume that rehabilitation attempts or changing the prison environment in some way would be successful in reducing recidivism rates "if we would only try them."
What is the actual evidence on the efficacy of rehabilitation programs?
I don't mean to say that the Norwegian model can't or wouldn't work in the US, but it can't be considered any more than "exploratory" from a US policy perspective.
I like the prison to become learning institutions rather that punishment factories. Continuous punishment makes people more resilient in a sense that they will fight and be willing to take more punishment and reject whatever they are being punished for. Eventually, these people get out, it would be nice if they were better than when they went in.
The rest are mostly shiftless and incorrigible and prison makes them worse people. They should either be released or kept in prison until dead. They should not be “stewed” in prison and then released upon you and me.
[1]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/meet-a-convicted-felon-who-beca...
But, sure, this seems like a good idea.
But first, stop all the horrible stuff, currently hurting prisoners.
In general I think this is a great idea, but for God's sake, teach them useful things that will help them get a job once the state lets them out of their cage, not crunchy liberal arts pablum and highly theoretical science that will get them nowhere career-wise. I say this as someone who made the mistake of going into debt to get a degree in English literature.
Gross.
The notion that colleges are supposed to be factories to create workers for jobs that probably won't exist by the time they graduate is bad enough; turning prisons into this is nothing short of a conflict of economic interest.
Learning theoretical science, poetry, dance, music, etc. sounds very plausibly helpful for people who are incarcerated.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/08/us/prison-reform-north-dakota...
For some people it is. I can't tell you how many times I've heard the phrase "lock him up and throw away the key." For some people, all they care about is that society provides a mechanism to obviate their need to seek retribution personally.
A better way of putting it should be that prisons should educate people to the level of high school or county college, something that should have been available to them but wasn't because of whatever factors. This way they get no handout not available to others and at the same time get a second chance at a life away from crime.
I don't think these sorts of jobs exist any more, or at least not in the quantity that they used to. I do think that job training (tangible, current skills) would be an appropriate replacement.
My funny thought in writing this was that the only way it would happen is if we made Mike Rowe secretary of education.
which doesn't mean lowering the overall barrier to education is not a good idea and probably would reduce incarceration in the first place...
Are you seriously suggesting that people would commit crimes to "get a free education"?
