Education Inside US Prisons Seminar

What is this course about and why is it important? The United States spends more than $80 billion annually on corrections at the federal, state, and local levels. It is the leader among industrial nations in incarceration with 1.9 million people locked in federal, state, and local carceral institutions, 2.9 million people are on probation, and 671,000 people are on parole. Put another way, the United States accounts for four percent of the world’s population but 16% of the globe’s incarcerated population. Once inside a prison, men and women of all races do what they can to survive physically and emotionally because 95 percent of them will return to their communities one day. Tragically, approximately 75% will be rearrested within five years after release from prison. To complicate matters, these adults do not serve a prison sentence alone. So do the families they leave behind. For example, many incarcerated men and women are parents of minors that are only months old to age seventeen. Nearly half of the adults in state prisons – 44 percent – lived with their children prior to incarceration, and 52 percent of mothers and 54 percent of fathers were the primary income earner for their household prior to incarceration. At a macro level, more than 5 million children—or 1 in 14 minors in the United States—have had a parent incarcerated in prison or jail at some point during their lives. For more than 60 years, federal leaders in Washington, and their colleagues at the state and local levels, have worked with public and private stakeholders to address how to use correctional education programs to improve the lives of people during and after incarceration. Although support for this approach from democrat and republican policymakers, law enforcement officers, prison wardens, employers, and university leaders is growing, education inside U.S. prisons remains one of the most contested issues in criminal justice policy today. Why? At the core of any conversation about education inside prisons is a 250-year-old debate about crime and punishment in America: Are prisons designed for punishment, rehabilitation, or a combination thereof? In this course, students will examine how legislative institutions, executive agencies, courts, and interest groups shape the provision of education inside prisons.