Education and crime are correlated societal concerns. As an individual’s educational attainment increases, the likelihood of this individual engaging in criminal behavior decreases. This negative relationship between education attainment and criminal behavior is hardly unexpected. The strength of this correlation, however, is astonishing. This is why few reports from government bureaus have received as much attention as the one by Caroline Harlow of the Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2003. According to that report, in the late 1990s, 65% of the U.S. prison population did not have a high school diploma, and only 13% had taken any postsecondary courses. By way of comparison, almost half of the U.S. general population had some college experience in 1997.

Incarceration in the United States has risen substantially over the ...