...Introduction Adult literacy and high school completion are two of the major current issue within the state of Alabama that directly affects incarcerated individuals. The National Adult Assessment Literacy (NAAL) is one of the main assessments of adult literacy within households and the U.S prison system (2007). The survey defines literacy as “using printed and unwritten information to function in society, to achieve one’s goal, and to develop knowledge and potential. (NAAL, (2007). “Without acquiring proper literacy skills and the basic skills from a high school diploma or graduation equivalency diploma (GED), an adult may not find or establish good employment opportunities nor defeat the stigma of poverty. Adult literacy and high school completion programs are in high demand not only in the state of Alabama but throughout the U.S especially within the state prisons. The NAAL (1994) reported that 75% of all prison inmates are deficient in various literacy and basic skills on the 12th grade level. In a subsequent report of the survey 10 years later, the NAAL reported only a small significant increase in literacy levels (NAAL, 2007). Adult education program are an integral part of the rehabilitation process in inmate sentencing. Adult education programs provide a prisoner with the means to seek an education and learn skills that he or she may not have learned before being incarcerated. Programs of the importance in many facilities include GED, literacy/ basic skills programs...
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...on “Education vs. Prison Funding” The government is responsible for security of its citizens and it is also responsible to provide a safe socio-economic environment to its people, and in this context; Jails and schools are two important institutions of any society, which need regular monetary support from the government. Thus government has to be very careful in allocating funds to both of the institutions; as one punishes the convicts and other makes the people skillful, and wise enough to get a job and earn money for family. Government has to be very careful in allocation of funds to them, as it is very critical to decide which institution should be allocated more money. The report, “Prison Spending Affecting Higher Education in California” states that in 2008 one of every 48 adults was in jail; this data states the very reason that why prisons are getting so much funding against education. We need to take very stringent and effective steps to reduce the population of prisons. The article, “Education and Public Safety (2007)” mentions that the lack of proper education is directly proportional to increase in prison population; the fact that most criminals are from some particular areas, where the high school dropout is maximum, proves this theorem. It is dangerous for the future of the society that the education in lack of subsidy and proper funding is becoming unaffordable for more and more students. The prison data shows that around 50 percent population in the prison is of...
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...When a parent sends their child to school, they feel a sense of security because they know where their child is and that their child will be protected. They trust in the school system that the school’s personnel will handle academic, social and behavioral problems in a professional manner. Every school is supposed to guide, respect, teach and discipline students in a way that would deter future altercations while still giving all students fair and equal opportunities to succeed in post secondary school, and future endeavors. However, our schools are not living up to these standards especially for our black males students and this causes the school to prison pipeline. The school to prison pipeline refers to the increasing ways in which students...
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...Effect of Correctional Education On Post Relief Employment and Recidivism (A 5-year follow-up study in the state of Indiana) In the journal “The Effect of Correctional Education On Post Relief Employment and Recidivism” Susan Lockwood, (Department of Correction Indianapolis) says that: “research revealed that prisoners, if they have no job or education that they would get out of jail and most likely come right back to prison. The Indiana Dept. of Corrections it examined the effect they did a study showed that in a five-year length of 6651 prisoners, they did a study on how education and post release employment on returning to prison, in order to see, if offenders would come back to prison, if they could not find and jobs. The study showed that offenders that didn’t get a high school diploma would come back to prison and it also showed that younger offenders would come back to prison too if they have not got a high school diploma. The tendency to relapse into an earlier unwelcomed type of conduct, especially crime rate among offenders who had a college education was lower than the offender who had below high school level. prison rehabilitation benefitshttp://www.emich.edu/library/ http://cad.sagepub.com/content/58/3/38 “Sex Offenders Face Extended Treatment” The journal article,”Sex Offenders Face Extended Treatment” Attorney General William Sorreal wanted to make violent sexual offenders do a psychological evaluation, before they get out of prison and for them to still...
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...Introduction to Argumentation: Education and Rehabilitation of Prison Inmates Nicole Watford ITT Tech June 22, 2013 Education and Rehabilitation of Prison Inmates The strain on law enforcement agencies to control crime could be greatly reduced if we were able to decrease the number of repeat offenders by offering both rehabilitation and educational resources to those inmates eligible for parole. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, (http://www.bjs.gov) released prisoners with the highest rearrest rates were robbers (70.2%), burglars (74.0%), larcenists (74.6%), motor vehicle thieves (78.8%), those in prison for possessing or selling stolen property (77.4%), and those in prison for possessing, using, or selling illegal weapons (70.2%). Much of the prison population is made up of inmates that have never obtained a high school diploma. An inmate being paroled with nothing to show for his or her time except for a prison record will discover it very difficult to find gainful employment. Most find it easier to return to the actions and behavior that led to their imprisonment, which is why fifty percent of former inmates return to prison within three years of release. Drug and alcohol rehabilitation is also key in reducing the rate of prisoners being readmitted to the prison population, “77% of convicted jail inmates were alcohol or drug-involved at the time of their current offense” (James, 2002, p. 2). According the Legislative Analyst’s Office of California...
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...The School to Prison Pipeline: The Criminalization of American Students The School to Prison Pipeline: The Criminalization of American Students Kimberly N. Wright Western Governors University Introduction Your permanent record! The thing that was held over most of our heads when we were in school. Your teacher or maybe your parents threatened that your bad behavior was going to end up on your “permanent record” and ruin your life. We shrugged them off, thought they were being dramatic or crazy and didn’t think much of it. Unfortunately for some students, the School to Prison Pipeline is making the threat of a bad permanent record all too real, as well as the consequences behind it. What is happening? Research suggests that The School to Prison Pipeline is damaging to students because it disproportionately affects poor, minority, and special needs students and is supported by unfairly applied disciplinary policies like “zero tolerance” and the standardized testing requirements backed by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. The School to Prison Pipeline, or Cradle to Prison Pipeline as some may refer to it as is the set of rules and policies that are currently funneling school children into the juvenile and criminal court systems. While order is needed in classrooms, the School to Prison Pipeline is a disservice to students and society given that these policies heavily impact special needs, minority, and poor students. With the...
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...Many ex-felons who want to change cannot move on with their lives after being released from prison. One of those reasons is because they have a hard time finding a job after being released. The system makes it harder for them. Some felons go in at a young age, most times so early that they do not even achieve a high school education. Felons are unable to vote causing the system to remain against them. Prisons are placed far away from society. After being released ex-felons usually return to high crime rate areas. Most ex-felons have a hard time moving on with their lives, after being released from jail because they have multiple factors working against them. “Men and women who have served extensive prison sentences…are not only left with little or no social support but also clearly marked by the criminal justice system as potentially threatening repeat offenders". (Moore 783) What Moore is saying in this quote is that the justice system marks these ex-felons as a criminal for life, making it hard for them to find employment. The system is designed to offer no help to these...
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...challenges she faced while growing up. She discussed the poor economic conditions and the violence surrounding her hometown of Greensboro, North Carolina. She used illustrations to help the audience visual some of the events she witnessed in her life. One image was the Greensboro Massacre, which occurred when Jayne was a child. The Greensboro Massacre was a shooting of five protestors by the Ku Klux Klan due to racial issues. Her lecture then transitions into her teen years and high school. Jayne always had a love for books and reading, after high school she furthered her education by going to college. Towards the end of her lecture she began to reflect on her current life. She talked about her students at Chester High School and...
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...Section e. Controlling Section Financial Section VIII. Financial Budget & Explanation Page 23 IX. Summary Page 24 Introduction This strategic management plan will address and offer suggestions to rectify an organizational problem in the state of Mississippi. In our opinion, it is a problem that the state continues to plan to build and invest in correctional facilities based on indicators that forecast the number of citizen that will end up in prison. Rather than only using these forecasting indicators guide decision making about increasing correctional facility capacities, we believe the state of Mississippi should use these indicators to develop preventative programs to keep citizens out of prison. The indicators used by the state of Mississippi to determine future prison population are 1) The average third grade reading levels of students across the state and 2) The average number of prisoners released from prison...
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...will spend 7 hours, 180 days a year for 13 years in a public school classroom (Fast Facts). Every parent, every morning is putting faith in the people who run these public schools that their child will receive a proper education that will prepare them for college and eventually their career. School comes at a critical time of a child’s life where their brain development is crucial to their intellectual and emotional capabilities. Without these skills, children are more likely to drop out, work at dead end jobs, be on public assistance or end up in prison. But, if we can help to fix our education system, we can help fix our economy, our neighbor hoods, and our country. Out of 28 developed countries, the United States ranks 20th. In Alabama, only 18% of eighth graders are proficient in reading, and in states across America only 20 to 35 % of students are reading at grade level according to Waiting for Superman, a documentary directed by David Guggenheim. The problem begins between the 5th and 7th grade. This is where students being to go from B students to C and D students. By the time they have reached the 7th grade, they feel as though they are stupid. But are the students less intelligent? Or is there a bigger problem, asks Geoffrey Canada, a leader of education reform and founder of the Harlem Children’s Zone, a charter school that guarantees its student’s will graduate despite being in the heart of the worst school district in New York. Dr. Robert Balfanz of Johns Hopkins...
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...Thomas 2/25/2014 The Education Crisis in America Currently the U.S. has a major problem on its hands, education today is constantly losing money while we put more of that money and time into our prisons rather than our schools. By showing kids that it is more important to be tough on crime than it is for a proper education is wrong. If these practices continue you can expect to see higher drop-out rates and larger prison populations. Education should be the U.S.’s top priority and we should take pride in the greatest education system in the world. Education provides students not with just knowledge but ethics, character development and self-esteem which are important skills for the workplace and in life. That is why it is imperative that we change our education system to a higher standard and emphasize quality education for all in the U.S. to provide a better future for all students. The U.S. is currently putting less into schools and education while putting more into prisons and defense. States are choosing to increase spending on prisons while the funding for education is constantly decreasing. “In 33 of 50 states, corrections- related costs made up a larger proportion of the general fund than in the previous fiscal year, while spending on K-12 and higher education decreased” ( Hawkins). The U.S. is silently making a decision to keep people incarcerated while caring less about a proper education. What they don’t understand is that a proper education is the key to keeping...
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...The number of offenders reentering society from prison and jail is steadily increasing yearly. States are diligently working to identify methods to help offenders successfully reintegrate into society. Some initiatives available in Harris County, TX include prison education programs, life and job skills training and counseling services. This paper focuses on the educational opportunities available for offenders in Harris County, TX. The education opportunities are structured to assist offenders with incarceration related factors and attempts to help offenders with successful reintegration with family, the community and society as a whole. I will discuss several educational initiatives available to offenders and how these initiatives correlate to our text. Harris County, TX . On March 12, 2004 the CEA unanimously voted to grant accreditation to Harris County Sheriff’s Office Inmate Education Program. The Harris County Sheriff’s Office became the first county jail in the U.S. to receive the Correctional Education Association (CEA) accreditation for its Inmate Education Program (Albers, 2006:15). This recognition sets Harris County Sheriff’s Office to a high standard to be compared with. The educational facility is located on Crites Street in Harris County which opened in 2003. The Inmate Education Program began in 1973 as a way to offer qualified offenders an opportunity to obtain an education to prepare for life after prison or jail. Since its inception, the program created...
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...is essential for the transition back into society after release from prison. Prison libraries serve those who are incarcerated within federal, state, and local institutions. The history of reading within prison can be traced back to the late 1700's and early 1800's when mostly male prisoners were provided with religious material to review in order to reflect on the their actions and repent. Current prison libraries offer services that teach, guide, entertain, and also provide a link to home. At the end of 2014, there was an estimated 6,851,000 people in the adult correction system in the United States (Giaze, Kaebe, Minton, & Tsoutis, 2015). Nationwide literacy statistics show that more than 60% of all incarcerated individuals are functionally illiterate (Literacy Statistics, n.d.). Prison libraries are an important tool in providing services to this underserved population. Prison Literacy In 1994, the U.S. Department of Education presented the findings of a survey regarding literacy within the prison system (Haigler,...
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...Racial Disparities in America’s Judicial System The mandatory imprisonment policies written for the judicial system are creating disparity of minority inmate population primarily due to non-violent drug crimes and the unjust mandatory minimum sentencing laws. America’s prisons are the most populated in the world, and they are disproportionately populated by minorities due to the set of mandatory imprisonment policies set in place. Over the past five decades, the disparity between races has widened dramatically according to the National Center on Institutions. In the 1950’s, blacks and Hispanics were the minorities in the prison system, whereas today whites are. Is this due to poverty? I’m sure poverty plays a big role in most cases. Robert Woodson Jr., president of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise said the reason young men engage in criminal activity is not just for money, it is to make a name for themselves, to have some expression of worth, even if the expression is self-destructive. Crack cocaine hit the streets in the early 1980’s, infesting the lower income areas. It’s a cheap drug compared to cocaine and easier to come by than some of the higher priced drugs. Is this considered racial disparity? The Sentencing Project in 2007 states that two-thirds of the regular crack users are white and Latino, 82 percent of defendants sentenced in federal court for crack offences are African-American. Criminologist William Chambliss suggest that blacks are more...
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...A Look at Racial Disparity in the United States Prison System Micah O’Daniel Institutional Corrections 2/22/11 Racial inequality in the American criminal justice system has a strong effect of many realms of society such as the family life, and employment. Education and race seem to be the most decisive factors when deciding who goes to jail and what age cohort has the greatest percentage chance of incarceration. Going to prison no longer affects just the individual who committed the crime. Instead, the family and community left behind gain a new burden by one individual's actions. The United States still has a large disparity between Whites and Blacks and now a growing Hispanic population. This racial disparity in the educational system, job sector, and neighborhoods have all contributed to the booming prison population in the latter part of the 20th century which has only continued to widen in the 21st century. At the end of 2006, the Bureau of Justice released data that stated that there were 3,042 black male prisoners per 100,000 black males in the United States, compared to 1,261 Hispanic male prisoners per 100,000 Hispanic males, and 487 white male prisoners per 100,000 white males (USDOJ, 2008). The likelihood of black males going to prison in their lifetime is 16% compared to 2% of white males and 9% of Hispanic males (USDOJ, 2008). Other social factors can be linked to the racial inequality in the criminal justice system such as socioeconomic status, the environment...
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