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Education

A range of educational opportunities is available in prisons, jails, juvenile justice facilities, and various community-based settings. Classes are often tailored to the needs of students and seek to provide learning experiences that will help them during their sentence and after release. For example, those entering correctional facilities may require classes in literacy, communication, and other subjects that will ease their transition into a corrections setting. In contrast, those who are nearing release will benefit from learning experiences that prepare them for the transition into a society that is very different from that found in prison, and, depending on their length of sentence, possibly unlike what they left behind. Other courses or learning may be selected based on age, gender, prior education and skills, and other factors.

Education

A U.S. Supreme Court Justice once stated that criminals are sent to prison as punishment, not to be punished. However, many citizens are against educational programs in prisons. Deprivation of education in prisons is a means of punishing prisoners.

These same citizens expect prisoners to be rehabilitated upon their release. Rehabilitation starts with education. Education unlocks many doors in a person's mind, giving a person legitimate skills and opportunities upon release.

Education also changes the way people think. It gives people hope and confidence in a future free of crime and incarceration. To eradicate education in prisons is to abandon prisoners in their quest for successful reintegration into society after they've paid their debt.

Education also plays a key role in prisoners' pursuits for redemption, be it spiritual or secular. How can I redeem myself or prove worthy of freedom if I am not invested with the proper tools to accomplish these objectives? I fail society because my incarceration has failed to prepare me adequately for my return to society. How can you expect me to build a better life and become a better citizen if I'm not given the appropriate blueprints? To deprive a prisoner of education while incarcerated is to render that person useless. We live in a society that emphasizes the importance of education in terms of success.

Finally, who do you want for a neighbor: An educated ex-con focused on positive productivity, or an uneducated ex-con focused on the only avenue you have left open: Crime?

John RowellDixon, Correctional Center, Dixon, Illinois

History

The earliest U.S. prisons generally sought to educate prisoners through religious instruction. Pennsylvania's Walnut Street Jail tried to reform and teach inmates by encouraging hard work and religious contemplation. Both activities were conducted in solitude. Over time, however, education outgrew solitary Bible reading, culminating in the introduction of a school in 1798, together with a library of 110 books.

The competing Auburn system that provided the model for most penitentiaries in the federal and state systems was far less supportive of prison classes, because of a concern that they might distract inmates from the more important tasks of prison labor. Nonetheless, by 1870 the National Prison Association, which was the forerunner of the American Correctional Association, set out in its Declaration of Principles that “education is a vital force in the reformation of fallen men and women” (Conrad, 1981, p. 1). Since then prison classes have been an entrenched part of the prison experience.

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