Bright Hopes, Dim Realities
Vocational Innovation in American Correctional Education
Download
Download eBook for Free
Format | File Size | Notes |
---|---|---|
PDF file | 4.4 MB | Use Adobe Acrobat Reader version 10 or higher for the best experience. |
Purchase
Purchase Print Copy
Format | List Price | Price | |
---|---|---|---|
Add to Cart | Paperback64 pages | $23.00 | $18.40 20% Web Discount |
To shed new light on the history of correctional education in America and on the implications of that history for reform in correctional education in the 1990s, this Note identifies some general tendencies in the history of correctional education in the 19th and 20th centuries, and reinterprets the contributions of the famous prison superintendent, Zebulon Brockway, to correctional education. The authors also use a case study of the New York State Vocational Institution to examine the enormous difficulties that have bedeviled even the best-designed and well-intentioned efforts to transform prisons into institutions of vocational training. Among their conclusions, the authors find that (1) the 1980s were not propitious for innovation in correctional education, as the period lacked an ideological consensus favoring rehabilitation over punishment; (2) corrections has not always been the enormous drain on local, state, and federal treasuries that it has become in recent years; (3) vocational education has been inappropriately cast as an either-or, inflexible substitute for remunerative prison labor; and (4) vocational education is an intrinsically unstable innovation in correctional institutions, since constituencies outside the prisons care more about the products, and their remunerative value, than about preserving the integrity of the training program itself.
This report is part of the RAND Corporation note series. The note was a product of the RAND Corporation from 1979 to 1993 that reported other outputs of sponsored research for general distribution.
Permission is given to duplicate this electronic document for personal use only, as long as it is unaltered and complete. Copies may not be duplicated for commercial purposes. Unauthorized posting of RAND PDFs to a non-RAND Web site is prohibited. RAND PDFs are protected under copyright law. For information on reprint and linking permissions, please visit the RAND Permissions page.
The RAND Corporation is a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis. RAND's publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors.