All educational programs for them must be relevant to the problems they encountered on the outside that led them to their crimes. Relevancy is a key issue in retaining inmates in the literacy program. No textbook or video programming were located that were produced specifically for the inmate population. There is an indication that further successes will be garnered by quality literacy programs based on inmate peer tutoring. The Prison Literacy Project reports enormous success with an inmate managed literacy programs.
Inmates create the program and run it.
A parallel volunteer group of managers functions for them on the outside. Volunteers do those jobs that the inmates can't do on the outside. The volunteer co-manager says that the inmates are involved in the program and enthusiastic about it. A major component of the program is inmate peer tutoring. In another program, the inmates are tutoring the guards in basic literacy and Spanish.