There have been several empirical research materials providing evidence on the success of prison educational programs in reducing the return to prison rates. First and foremost, in Michigan, the Prisoner Education proponents have expressed the importance of educational programs for the ex-convicts while being incarcerated in reducing the rate of recidivism as documented by Brunton-Smith and Hopkins (2014). The primary goal of several prison education programs is to offer behavior correctional lessons while providing instructions that will help refine the convicts’ behavior to meet the behavioral norms of the general public. Skills are incorporated into the prison educational curriculum which is made up of basic skills of literacy and essential …show more content…
Research has by Alvarez et al. (2016) established that most prisoners opt for educational programs for several reasons. First, they are offered excellent opportunities to gain social learning, receive vocational and academic literacy and have the opportunity to apply the learned skills and knowledge while still in prison and even later outside the prison walls. In fact, technical skills such as cooking, carpentry, and masonry obtained from prisons have been helping most ex-convicts to land jobs in the informal sector as chefs, carpenters and even as music artists who have considerably reduced the burden of unemployment. Therefore, by getting certification in these skills, employers get the notion that ex-offender is fit for certain skill requiring jobs and thus it enhances to gain a job. In fact, this advantage may contribute to signaling the penalty that affects most ex-prisoners encounter with the labor market. They also established that such former prisoners are preoccupied with economic development as they seek to reintegrate back into the society and are less likely to fall prey to …show more content…
justice system indicates that prison education programs have primarily reduced issues of ex-convicts recidivism (Visher et al. 2017). A study carried out by Visher et al. (2017) to examine the lasting effects of prisoner re-entry services on recurrence established that prison education programs impacted positively on the prisoner reintegration into the community. The data collected from 12 prisoner reentry programs from twelve different states in the United States, to evaluate the effect of pre-release programs on time spend out before rearrests and the total number of rearrests within the first fifty six months of post-release for male ex-convicts indicated that, prisoners who had partaken in the reentry educational program spend longer time before being reprehended and the arrests were significantly fewer (Visher et al., 2017). However, it was also established that the impact on recidivism was entirely dependent on the type of services offered in the training programs. For instance, services aimed at personal change had more results than those inclined towards imparting practical skills in the inmates. Therefore, there is a gap in the type of reentry programs being offered in the United States. The stakeholders need to streamline the re-entry training programs by linking in-prison educational services to the post re-release support from the