By Sarah Butrymowicz and Jackie Mader / The Hechinger Report Toney Jennings was illiterate when he was arrested at age 16. In the six months he spent at the Lowndes County Jail in Eastern Mississippi, he says he played basketball, watched TV, and “basically just stayed to myself.” A special education student, Jennings qualified for extra
By Sajad Shakoor The Tayba Foundation offers a correspondence program for prisoners desiring to study the Islamic sciences. On the website, Tayba Foundation lists over 20 courses complete with texts, supplementary ready materials, quizzes, essay prompts, and accompanying CD commentaries and/or DVD’s. All of it is in a semester format convenient to students. Currently, the Tayba Foundation has about 400 students
Oklahoma teachers would receive a $2,500 across-the-board pay raise under a budget proposal approved Thursday by the State Board of Education, but they shouldn’t plan to spend the money any time soon. “It is time we as a state offer better compensation to these dedicated and talented individuals who give so much of themselves in
The government of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu is expanding a program that allows prison industries to compete in the open marketplace under the ironic brand name “Freedom.” Prison industry programs already exist at nine central prisons, three women’s prisons and nine district jails scattered across Tamil Nadu, located in the southern tip of the Asian nation. The facilities hold a combined total of about 11,000 prisoners.
Prison authorities are adding open-air bazaars to market fresh produce grown by prisoners to shoppers from neighboring communities. The bazaars are in addition to current prison industries that include the production of soap, leather, textiles, books and baked goods. Traditionally, those products have been sold only to other government agencies and are considered substandard.
“So far, we were manufacturing goods for the police and other departments. Such government clients are not very demanding in terms of pricing, delivery schedule and quality, although we ourselves try to maintain this,” said S.K. Dogra, Additional Director-General of Police in Tamil Nadu. “But once you operate in the open market, you have to adopt the best commercial practices. So, naturally the entire process of manufacturing will have to move up the scale in terms of efficiency and quality.”
Providing prisoners with skills they can use to obtain jobs after their release is a major objective of the program. Prison officials said they have identified individuals who are qualified to provide training to prisoners in the use of modern manufacturing technology. Additionally, a portion of the revenue generated by the sale of prison-made goods on the open market is earmarked for prisoners’ accounts.
By The State Journal Inmates at West Virginia’s regional jails will soon be able to sign up for a financial education course designed to help them avoid becoming repeat offenders. The course, developed by Financial Peace University, will stress critical skills such as eliminating and avoiding debt, maintaining a monthly budget, keeping checkbooks balanced, and
By Estefania Florez / The Daily Illini The Education Justice Project is hosting a symposium on higher education programs in prison until Sunday. “Our mission is to build a model college-in-prison program that demonstrates the positive impacts of higher education upon incarcerated students, the family, the neighbors to which they return, the host institution – the
By The Daily Freeman Bard College’s Max Kenner, the executive director of the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI), received a 2014 Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award in Education. The award recognizes 10 of the year’s most amazing achievements and the innovators behind them in nine different categories. Kenner created the initiative as an undergraduate at Bard in
By Jerry Adler / Smithsonian Magazine Separated by eight years, a dozen subway stops, and a vast socioeconomic distance, Erica Mateo and Max Kenner had one thing in common growing up: They were no one’s candidates for most likely to succeed. Mateo was raised by her grandmother in one of Brooklyn’s roughest neighborhoods, dropped out
By Jay Derragon
The majority of people in prison are not hardened criminals; they are good people who have made bad decisions. Yet the current educational system in prisons leave little room for good people to learn how to avoid bad decisions. As W. Edwards Deming said: “A bad system will defeat a good person, every time.”The current system of prison education is not doing enough to empower behavioral change and rehabilitation of minds. The current “system of education” within prisons is antiquated, ineffective, costly and ripe for change. A transformation in methods, means, and thinking is desperately needed.
Since 1985, the number of people incarcerated has jumped from about 744,000 to over 3.3 million in 2011. That represents an overall increase of more than 400%. While all sectors have grown over that time period, the highest growth was in the federal prison population, which increased by 473%. Increases in the other sectors ranged from 175% in state prisons to 178% in local jails. “The current correctional rehabilitation system is obviously is not working”.
The Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP) reported in 2011, that nearly 7 in 10 people who are formerly incarcerated will commit a new crime, and half will end up back in prison within three years. Given that about 95 out of every 100 incarcerated people eventually rejoin society, it is crucial that we develop programs and tools to effectively reduce recidivism.
By Levi LaChapelle / Truthout Op-Ed Colleges are staging areas for economic success and personal prosperity. As sociologist Andrew Cherlin recently observed to The New York Times, “A bachelor’s degree is the closest thing to a class boundary that exists today.” Indeed, a report from the Pew Research Center shows that for the last two decades, only college graduates