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| Inmate Education Is Found to Lower Risk of New Arrests |
| By New York Times |
| Published: 11/26/2001 |
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Inmates who receive schooling - through vocational training or classes at the high school or college level - are far less likely to return to prison within three years of their release, according to a study from the Department of Education. The study, which followed more than 3,000 prisoners in Maryland, Minnesota and Ohio, found that three years after their release, 22 percent of the prisoners who had taken classes returned to prison, compared with 31 percent of the released prisoners who had not attended school while behind bars. 'The public safety question, the reduction in crime is very important,' said Stephen J. Steurer of the Correctional Education Association, the lead author on the study. Some education officials said they hoped the study, to be released this week, would help build a consensus that prison education was worthwhile. A second study, which will also be released this week, found even greater benefits among women who took college classes offered at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, New York's only maximum-security prison for women. According to that study, by the Open Society Institute, fewer than 8 percent of the former inmates who attended college classes in prison returned to prison after three years, compared with almost 30 percent of the women who had not participated in the college program. While the three-state study looked at all prisoners to be released in a given period, the Bedford Hills study compared a group of women who had taken college classes to a group that had not, leaving open the possibility that the results were due, at least in part, to self-selection, with the women most motivated to avoid reincarceration being the ones who took the college classes. Michelle Fine, a City University of New York Graduate Center professor who directed the Bedford Hills study, said that while self-selection might have played a role most of the women who had the educational background to be eligible for the college classes participated, so the program was not limited to the most motivated inmates. |
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