Texas has remained an anomaly in this respect, still retaining a college program for prisoners through agreements at the state level. Yet the purpose of college, in or out of prison, has always been to cultivate cogs for the capitalist machine through imparting values and a world view amenable to elites.
College is good if a person can read between the lines and sift out the capitalist crap.
Many students and prisoner students swallow everything taught to them in college at face value without much critical examination. Simply put, upward mobility means an individualistic attempt to scramble as far up the hierarchical ladder with total lack of concern for one's class bretheren. This myopic view often means aspiring to a position in which the person has their foot on the necks of their former class bretheren, i.e. they become a boss. How can this be considered rehabilitative since the same selfish and individualistic lack of concern for others that might motivate a robbery are also inherent in the quest to become a boss. The same values run through both.