Why Correctional Education Matters

Transcript

Anita Chandra

We are incarcerating a lot of people, disproportionately men of color.

Barack Obama

Our incarceration rate is four times higher than China's.

Lois Davis

Having very long sentences for drug-related offenses.

Anita Chandra

And we have a huge revolving-door issue around recidivism.

Rob Portman

And if we don't provide some help to them, they unfortunately are going to turn around and get back into the prison system.

James Anderson

Historically, there was a real shift away from rehabilitation as an appropriate goal of corrections and a move towards— really towards punishment.

John Linton

The most prominent change in terms of federal funding was removal of eligibility for Pell Grants for incarcerated individuals.

Anita Chandra

More and more restrictions on educational support across the board.

Stephen Steurer

People in corrections were saying, "This is crazy because now we're warehousing, we're spending all this money, and we're not getting anything back."

Michael Rich

RAND was asked by the Department of Justice to analyze both the costs of effective correctional education programs as well as the payoffs.

Lois Davis

This was 30 years of research that we were looking at.

Robert Bozick

We identified 58 unique studies on the relationship between correctional education and a range of different outcomes. If you look in the general population of inmates, recidivism rates tend to hover around 43 percent.

Lois Davis

For individuals who participate in any type of correctional education program, their risk of being reincarcerated drops by 13 percentage points. For those who participate in college programs, they're half as likely to be reincarcerated upon release.

John Linton

The RAND study translated the recidivism benefit into a cost-benefit analysis.

Robert Bozick

Every dollar invested in correctional education saves the taxpayer five dollars in terms of recidivism costs.

Anita Chandra

This kind of magnitude of potential impact and this kind of ratio of a 1:4, or a 1:5, that was surprising.

John Linton

And that payoff was related strictly to the recidivism reduction and the cost of confinement.

Lois Davis

If we took into account the indirect costs, for example, to society, to the justice system, to victims, that cost savings would be substantially larger.

Stephen Steurer

What's the value of all this? Why should you do it?

Esther

To keep me from coming back.

Thomas

Without correctional education, it would have been like merging into traffic on a highway with a tricycle, trying to keep up with society's demands.

John Linton

We can talk about providing education, not in terms of being nice to individuals who have committed crimes or coddling criminals. We can talk about it in terms of a sound investment of public resources.

James Anderson

Here in California, a bill was passed that specifically cited RAND's work.

Loni Hancock

We really used the material from the RAND study to help craft the bill, to make the case for the bill.

Brant Choate

We've actually incorporated the key findings from the RAND study in our new Correctional Peace Officer training program.

John Linton

I think it's really had a very significant impact on the field.

Anita Chandra

Lois and her team helped to spur a national dialog.

James Anderson

There's an increasingly bipartisan consensus that we can't incarcerate our way out of crime.

Danny K. Davis

We're on the cutting edge of some criminal justice reforms that I think are healthy and are going to be helpful for the country.

James Anderson

Congress is now reconsidering the ineligibility of prisoners for Pell Grants.

Loni Hancock

Ninety percent of incarcerated people will return to their communities.

Danny K. Davis

And the more able they are to work, to get a job, the better off everybody is going to be.

James Anderson

It reduces the enormous costs of crime, both on the victims of crime and on society as a whole.

Loni Hancock

I think it's going to change our entire prison system.

Anita Chandra

A high-impact solution that is relatively reasonable to implement.

Loni Hancock

To change the culture of our prisons from a culture of punishment to a culture of rehabilitation.