By Rebecca Elliott / Houston Chronicle Bags of chips, pairs of tennis shoes, packages of Ramen noodles. Over the years, revenue from purchases made by inmates at the Fort Bend County jail’s commissary has added up. Now, the proceeds are financing an expanded correctional education program, complete with a new vocational training facility. Come January,
By Rocky Barker and Cynthia Sewell / Idaho Statesman State officials are scrambling to preserve the network that lets Idaho students take distance learning and dual-credit classes now that a judge has voided the state’s contract for the Idaho Education Network. Six days after Gov. Butch Otter was decisively re-elected to a historic third term,
By Leigh Erin Carlson, National Director of Programs While news reports and scientific studies are now touting the benefits of prisoner education, at GOGI, it is considered old news that the education of inmates and prisoners correlates with increased levels of success upon release. We have known this fact because we asked the prisoners. By asking the prisoners what
By Samantha Schmieder / Gazette.Net Inmates at Montgomery County Correctional Facility participated in its first-ever educational fair on Wednesday, allowing them to see the many options available once released. Participating vendors included the University of Maryland University College, the Literacy Council of Montgomery County, the Aesthetics Institute of Cosmetology, and many other colleges, GED programs,
By Leah Binkovitz / Houston Chronicle Ramiro Eric Avalos just celebrated his 32nd birthday – his third awaiting trial in the Fort Bend County jail. “It’s not depressing like it used to be,” he said. That’s partly because he started taking GED classes under a new program the jail launched this year. The second set
By Kate Randall / World Socialist Website The prison populations in most US states are at historic highs. Prisons in 36 US states incarcerate three times as many people as they did in 1978. State prison systems account for 87 percent of the total prisoner population, or roughly 1.3 million in 2013 compared to about
When we last met Jail Education Solutions earlier this year, the startup was part of FastFWD, a social enterprise accelerator in Philly focused on public safety. Now, it just launched a pilot of its tablet-based wireless education system for inmates in prison and jail. It’s in the 8,500-bed correctional facility in Philadelphia and, according to co-founder
By Rebecca Klein / The Huffington Post If state budget trends reflect the country’s policy priorities, then the U.S. currently values prisoners over children, a new report suggests. A report released this week by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities shows that the growth of state spending on prisons in recent years has far
By Erin Baldassari / Bay City News Inmate education at the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department just got a little more sophisticated. Beginning this week, jail inmates will have the opportunity to access computer tablets as part of the institution’s educational programs, representatives said today. The San Francisco Sheriff’s Department, along with its associated charter school,
W.E. Donaldson Correctional Facility, Bessemer, Alabama, has a harsh atmosphere and reputation for housing some of the most dangerous criminals in the country. Death row inmates, some with life sentences without the possibility of parole and others with a chance to be released and lead a new life, are part of the W.E. Donaldson Correctional