Prison Inmate Urges Society to Embrace Education for Prisoners

Rewarding bad people for bad behavior.

Unfortunately, that's how the public often sees it when academics, lawyers and political pundits make the case that incarceration should entail less punishment and more reform — such as better efforts to educate inmates.

As Dan M. Kahan wrote in “What Do Alternative Sanctions Mean?” an influential Yale Law School paper from 1996:

Imprisonment is the punishment of choice in American jurisdictions … for those who commit serious criminal offenses, the law strongly prefers one form of suffering — the deprivation of liberty — to the near exclusion of all others … Imprisonment is harsh and degrading for offenders and extraordinarily expensive for society.

Nor is there any evidence that imprisonment is more effective than its rivals in deterring various crimes … theorists of widely divergent orientations — from economics-minded conservatives to reform-minded civil libertarians — are united in their support for alternative sanctions.

The problem is that there is no political constituency for such reform.

While "alternative sanctions" could mean many things in an academic sense, let's understand it here as simply putting a premium on education over punishment.

Indeed, the $80-billion-a-year price tag that America spends keeping criminals behind bars could be greatly reduced with further efforts in education.

Most of us can agree that our current incarceration system could be vastly improved. More than 40% of former inmates wind up back in prison within a year of being released.

And, according to a five-year study by U.S. Department of Justice, three-fourths are incarcerated again within five years.

A recent blog entry for the libertarian magazine Reason on the latest Conservative Political Action Conference, held earlier this month outside Washington, D.C., indicates that even for the usually tough-on-crime conservatives, the evidence is making more sense.

Additionally, in 2015 the highest-ever number of convicted prisoners were exonerated of their crimes, according to a report by the National Registry of Exonerations, a project run by the law school of the University of Michigan, which has tracked prisoner exonerations since 1989.

Given the evidence of what works to reduce recidivism and the fallibility of so many convictions, why don't we put a premium on education for inmates?

The reality is that the U.S. electorate abhors the thought of rewarding bad behavior, even if the "reward" (education) is what's best for everyone. Campaigns promising toughness against crime and criminals win elections. Many remember how Democrat Michael Dukakis essentially tanked his bid for presidency in 1988 when he gave a soft-on-crime response in a debate against the future president, George Herbert Walker Bush. Before that, Dukakis was leading Bush in most polls by 20 points.

Given what I know — what I've seen and experienced first-hand, and what volumes of data shows — I urge more Americans to see beyond vengeance and punishment, which is so expensive to the average taxpayer, and embrace education for prisoners.

We are not monsters; we are human beings who made mistakes. Ninety-five percent of us will be reintroduced into society after we've done our time. It would be better for everyone to have a hopeful, well-educated ex-convict who can contribute to our world, rather than commit more crimes out of desperation, joblessness and poverty.

Prison is too expensive for that.

Christopher Zoukis, author of "College for Convicts: The Case for Higher Education in American Prisons" (McFarland & Co., 2014) and the "Prison Education Guide" (Prison Legal News Publishing, 2016), is the founder of PrisonEducation.com and PrisonLawBlog.com. He is incarcerated at the medium-security Federal Correctional Institution Petersburg in Virginia.