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Critical reflection on prison education
Rehabilitation programs in prisons: are they effective why or why not
Critical reflection on prison education
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Invisible Men: A Contemporary Slave Narrative in the Era of Mass Incarceration (2016) written by Flores Forbes illustrates the importance of prison education in the United States. Prison education is a program where inmates may be permitted to either continue or start their college education while serving their sentence. In this paper, I will address the meaning and purpose of prison education. I will discuss the importance of the policy, and how it may change someone’s life like it did to Flores Forbes. My goal in this paper is to alert other colleagues the important issue of education within our prisons.
When society is not accepting the newly released prisoner, it makes them feel like they don’t belong, so they go back to their old ways,which involves reoffending. For instance, when a person has served a long-winded sentence,it could be hard to convert what society is now versus what it was before. In addition, programs are provided to reduce the rate of recidivism, but the effectiveness of the program is the bigger issue. Programs tend to be generalized and do not meet the needs of an inmate on an individual level. Also, the program could lack the essentials such as funding and proper staffing.
In the essay, Reflection From a Life Behind Bars: Build Colleges, Not Prisons, the author James Gilligan was a director of mental health for the Massachusetts prison system, and he argues that prisons should be torn down and become boarding schools for the inmates to receive as much education as they want. He explains how kids who experience violence, grow up as violent adults, and he questioned why we continue to use violence against adults hoping it stops them from being violent. There’s evidence that the most successful programs for preventing recidivism are ones where inmates receive college degrees. The prisons are also extremely inhumane in the environment, as Gilligan compares them to zoos. All these reasons Gilligan gives for his argument
When the American prison system began, it was believed that rehabilitation, the act of restoring one’s character, could be beneficial for criminals to start over. According to Tom Wicker, “The system…began as a reform impulse, the idea that if offenders were isolated, shielded from the public mockery that had accompanied hangings and the stocks, given time to repent, and worked hard, they could be turned away from crime and transformed into useful citizens” (xii). Criminals could become better citizens and have a positive outlook for a future if they worked hard and were secluded from the outside world. Although this idea seems more humane, it did not last long in the prison system because many people believed that any crime committed deserved
They are less likely to return if low level drug offenders receive treatment during and after prison. Olson and Lurigion state ,"Drug addiction is a chronic relapse brain disease with biological, psychological, social and behavioral concomitants"(600). If a drug criminal is treated for his addiction, he/she will be less likely to commit crimes. The treatment has to be comprehensive and provide a wide range of treatment (Olsen and Lurigion (601) Many professions believe treatment is more effective than incarceration for several months.
Mass incarceration is a large issue in the United States. Largely due to drug-related crimes. Researchers, government officials, and citizens are all attempting to push anti-drug policies to attempt and reduce the level of drug usage in the United States. Many individuals, myself included, believe that alternately there should be more focus on prevention and treatment of criminals rather than harsher punishments imposed. While anti-drug policies and harsher punishments may help deter crimes from happening it does not address the issue of inmates and their actions after incarceration.
To address these challenges, prisons must adopt a more comprehensive approach to rehabilitation and reintegration. This approach should include providing access to education, job training, mental health services, adequate nutrition, health care, counseling, and humane living conditions. Access to these resources is crucial for the development of skills, coping mechanisms, and overall well-being. Educational and vocational programs can equip inmates with the skills and knowledge to find stable jobs, which can reduce the likelihood of reoffending.
By the time an individual gets to prison, they have a wealth of knowledge through their experiences with crime. The prisoner can draw on this knowledge and use it to their advantage in a positive and productive manner. The prisoner can have a different perspective of themselves and can see the world through different eyes. Through education the prisoner has hope and can see the prospects of a
In order to do this they need to make new centers to help prisoners inside better themselves. In Alabama prisons may soon shut down 14 of its prisons for overcrowding, neglect, and violence in the state’s correction systems. In the prison St. Clair Holman in Alabama the prison system makes prisoners act different. There is no safety, security or supervision. “We have people being killed, sexually assaulted, raped, stabbed on daily basis at St. Clair, Holman, and multiple facilities; it’s a systemwide problem,” said Charlotte Morrison, a senior attorney at the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), which represents Alabama prisoner.”
The concept of ‘recidivism’ is central to understanding the criminal justice system. Recidivism occurs when a person commits a crime again despite having been punished before. One of the main goals of the criminal justice system is to reduce recidivism but in fact longer sentences may increase the probability of recidivism (Griffiths & Cunningham, 2000). One reason is that the climate within a prison is not helpful to the inmate in making personal changes that can lead to reduced recidivism. However, psychologists are trying to develop intervention programmes that in fact lead to such personal changes so as to reduce recidivism.
This means that we are rapidly gaining more and more people in prisons, and not only that but a lot of them are illiterate. According to The Innocence project and staff calculations, the average state prison gets about $42,843 annually (N1). If they focused less on certain things and more on their education, they would always have the money for educational classes for inmates. ”In 2004, less than a third of prisoners had access to prison education at any one time”. If the inmates have bad literacy when they enter prison, nothing will change if they don’t get the educational help that
A very important aspect of the criminal justice system is to ensure there is a way to rehabilitate offenders, not only incarcerate them. Rehabilitation in the criminal justice system means that there is an attempt by the system to restore a criminal back to a productive and useful member of society free of the life of crime. By rehabilitating an offender, the system is trying to alter their behavior and attitude in a positive way and to make them once again, law abiding citizens (Seiter, 2014). Rehabilitation can come in many forms, such as drug treatment, education, mental health treatment, develop better decision making skills, therapeutic counseling and even job training. An offender does need to be punished for breaking the law, but they need to accept responsibility for their crimes and eventually change their
The first challenge is breaking the myth that the cost of providing facilities to educate the prisoners is exceptionally high. Many in the public might be tempted to think that college education for prisoners costs millions of dollars in addition to the money already being spent on prisons. This is because the detainees will not be in a position to contribute anything towards this form of education (Stoll, Raphael, & Project Muse, 2009, p. 45). Being one of the largest costs borne by taxpayers besides budgets in defence, healthcare, and retirement benefits, it costs somewhere between $52 billion and $70 billion dollars on average for U.S. taxpayers annually and $31,238 cost per inmate; However, cost of providing a college education for an incarcerated student only costs $ 2,000 to $4,000 a year (“Breaking the Prison Cycle”) and, in the longer term, a prison education proves to be far more beneficial than harmful in terms of cost-benefit analysis. According to a research by RAND Corporation, “a $1 investment in prison education reducing incarceration costs by $4 to $5, and those who receive a prison education have 43% less change of returning to prison than inmates who do not”(“Education and Vocational Training,” 2013).
Recidivism refers to the repetition of criminal behavior (James, 2011). According to the United States Bureau of Justice 2010 statistics report, three-quarters of released prisoners are constantly rearrested for new crimes and more than half of these go back to prison in a period of two to three years after their release. Ex- inmates account for an approximated 19 percent of all arrests (Phelps, 2013, p.55). Criminals who return to the community are also most of the times worse off after a period of confinement than when they entered. It is attributable to the fact that these inmates learn antisocial and criminal attitudes from other
It cost the state of New York sixty thousand dollars to incarcerate one person, and in New York there are fifty-six thousand adults incarcerated. Hudson Link found that it would cost on average of five thousand dollars per year for seven years for their inmates to get a bachelor’s degree. Hudson Link saves New York taxpayers more than ten million dollars per year. The national rate of re-incarceration across the United States is forty-three percent, but less than two percent of Hudson Link alumni have returned to prison in over sixteen years. This program comes to show that education in prison facilities is effective and beneficial to our
