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Summary: The Importance Of Post-Secondary Education In Prisons

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For many years, there has been a huge debate on whether prisoners should be afforded the opportunity to further their education while in prison. Prison and college are the two most different paths that a person can go down in life. The differences between the two is that college is a positive experience and is rewarding in the end, whereas the other is completely opposite. Another difference between the two is the costs. An article released in 2011 stated that one year at a New Jersey state prison cost $44,000, and one year at Princeton University costs $37,000. Even though most colleges are funded in a variety of ways, most prisons rely on the government to foot the bill. Most would argue that inmates just don 't deserve post-secondary education and that tax dollars are being wasted, but actually there are great …show more content…

Allowing post-secondary education into prisons will reduce the crime rate. Along with the reduction of recidivism rates, crimes rate will be lowered. When an offender does not engage in criminal behavior or receive punishment for a past crime, then the recidivism rate drops. This means that there are less crimes being committed, lowering the overall crime rate. In a recent article, Virginia 's state senator, Mark Obenshain noted that the recidivism and crime rates have dropped since parole abolition. He also mentioned that Virginia 's crime rate dropped 47.4 percent in 2013, making them the state with the third lowest crime rate. This was a significant improvement from being the state that had the eighth lowest crime rate in 2004. In an article released by The Sentencing Project in 2014, it discussed three states that had their crime rates decline faster than the national average. These states were New York, California, and New Jersey. It was noted in this article that these states prison populations were of the states included where the crime rate declined in the entire country. Still, these three states fell at a faster pace than the entire

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