The ROI Paradigm in Higher Ed in Prison is Insufficient and Incomplete
By: Erin Corbett
Tags: Higher Education, Research, Criminal Justice Reform, Higher Ed In Prison, Prison Reform

Second Chance Educational Alliance students at their Spring Ceremony at the MacDougall-Walker Correctional Facility

** Note: All opinions herein are mine and reflect my personal beliefs. If you got smoke or want it, direct it to me**

Recently, the Vera Institute of Justice, in partnership with the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality, released “Investing in Futures.” This report is a call to arms for all supporters of reinstating Pell eligibility for incarcerated students. “Investing” presents a series of estimates and calculations that point directly to the economic and fiscal benefits of providing higher education courses in prison, adding further credence to research that is well over a century old. Since 1877 researchers and practitioners have been touting the benefits of education behind bars. RAND’s 2013 study caught everyone’s attention, even overshadowing their subsequent 2014 and 2018 releases (people in 2019 still cite the 2013 data even though that 2018 report was an update/refresh). It is likely that Vera’s report will be equally as distributed, as it has made the rounds in Washington Post, Inside Higher Education, and other higher education, mainstream media, and justice outlets.

I am here for any person/organization/entity that wants to restore Pell eligibility for incarcerated persons, so let me be very clear about that. However, as helpful as this piece is to reiterate the importance of providing education to those who are incarcerated, it misses critical opportunities to explore a more nuanced explanation of why higher education in prison is so important. From my vantage point, this report falls short in at least four areas.

First, and I cannot say this enough, post-release employment outcomes should not be categorized as educational outcomes. This is important because there are tens of thousands of collateral consequences of conviction that impact formerly incarcerated persons who enter the job market. We should not be hanging the worth of this endeavor on whether someone finds a job post-release or how much they make if they are fortunate enough to secure employment. “Investing” does not adequately account for collateral consequences of conviction; in fact, the word “collateral” is only mentioned one time, in a citation from Bruce Western whose most recent book Homeward follows individuals for a year after release from prison. Western has also contributed to the literature of this space here, here, and here, often recognizing that there are racial disparities in incarceration and hiring and these disparities increase when you consider criminal backgrounds. The late Devah Pager, in her seminal work Marked, found the same. To have a conversation about post-release outcomes without mentioning collateral consequences and without mentioning racial disparities is incomplete, at best, and irresponsible, at worst.

Second, if the value of providing higher education behind bars is rooted solely in post-release outcomes, then this report provides the perfect ammunition for detractors who do not believe that every incarcerated person should have access to educational opportunities. “Investing” mentions that almost half a million incarcerated people could be eligible to leverage Pell dollars for a postsecondary credential. What they fail to mention is that over 150,000 individuals are serving life sentences and an additional 53,000 are serving life without parole, according to The Sentencing Project. If economic return is the basis for legitimizing the quest to reinstate Pell, then where do the lifers and long timers fit in? Ostensibly they are not getting out and, therefore, cannot assume the role of cog in the economic wheel. Do they deserve to learn? This report does not allow space for them, or even attend to the fact that this is a population typically ignored.

Even for those serving 15+ years, not necessarily life, participation in educational programming — Pell notwithstanding — presents a series of barriers and challenges. Given the shift in sentencing reform laws, a sizable number of those life sentences are being overturned. Some death sentences are even being commuted to life. In my family alone, my uncle’s death sentence in Florida was commuted to life without parole. Would he be welcome in a classroom without the capacity to contribute to the tax revenue of his home community? When we focus on short-timers, or only those with short time remaining on their sentence, we dismiss the fact that education is personally transformative.

We also dismiss the fact that in some instances it is those long timers and lifers who often set the tone of the correctional facility. Sean Pica, Executive Director of Hudson Link in New York, often speaks about how he was provided an encouraging network as he did his time; Syrita Steib-Martin, Co-Executive Director of Operation Restoration in New Orleans, will often recount how the women with whom she was incarcerated would be sure to create an environment conducive for her to study. While this may not be the case in EVERY facility, it is the case in ENOUGH facilities that we need to pay better attention.

Third, and tied to the previous point, this report glosses over the social benefits of higher education in prison; we are left to believe that either those benefits are not as important as the economic estimates — again, estimates that do not take into account the reality of collateral consequences and racial discrimination — or that we cannot quantify them. Both assumptions are patently false. First of all, the social and personal benefits of a transformative education manifest themselves in students re-establishing communication and relationship building with their families, often beginning to reverse the dynamic of the relationships that contributed to their incarceration. This is generational impact. When a student, a lifer, can read to his or her child during visitation or talk to their school aged (P-16 is considered school aged to me) child about what they are learning, that is movement making; that is the restructuring of social capital networks that perhaps had once been frayed and stressed. Second, it is wholly possible to measure the social benefits of participating in education; you just have to want to find the ways. IHEP’s KPI work, in addition to determining some universal program elements that point to quality and equitable access and outcomes, will measure not only elements of the correctional environment to gauge impact on student success in postsecondary prison programs (because research, research, and research have told us that culture impacts achievement), but will also measure how one student’s participation can impact the behavior and perception and experiences of those to whom they are strongly connected (props to Howard Henderson and Manuel Gonzalez-Canche for their work on this). These are the aspects that practitioners understand as vital to the work being done and it is these aspects that need to be elevated and amplified.

But fundamentally, fourth flaw, nothing presented here is novel. We know that participating in postsecondary behind bars increases post-release outcomes and wages; we know that not a lot of programs are operating in comparison to how many were operating before the Pell ban; we know that, for blue collar/manufacturing industries, prison education programs provide returning citizens with critical industry skill sets; we know that educating incarcerated people is simply an overall good thing. Pilsbury told us this in 1877; research keeps telling us today. And yet we are only JUST NOW starting earnest conversations about lifting the Pell ban. Why do we keep focusing on this post-release paradigm, chasing cost savings-related data points, constantly citing taxpayer benefits, when Rob Scott brilliantly reminds us:

“I do not think that college-in-prison programs do what they do in order to provide their states with cost-effective crime reduction. This was not the main argument that was made during the 1994 debate over Pell Grants in prison, either. Opponents of college-in-prison did not deny that college reduced recidivism (though they accused the success stories of being anecdotal), and proponents of college-in-prison used several other arguments in addition to talking about reducing recidivism (Page, 2004). The principal contention was over whether ‘criminals’ deserved any entitlement programs at all, and what message such programs sent to ‘non-criminals’...The ban on Pell Grants in prison was an ideological decision, and it is unclear whether better numbers can change this.”

If we remember the ideological basis behind the Pell ban, generally, then we must accept that part of the solution to convince legislators to lift it must include conversation and research oriented toward the personhood and humanity of incarcerated people. What we continue to hear is that when people do site visits to higher ed in prison programs, they meet PEOPLE. They talk to PEOPLE. Nobody in these visits walks around saying, “Hi! My name is $5 taxpayer savings.” It is not enough to fall back on the refrain of “Well, conservatives want to see the dollars and cents,” when 1) you provide dollars and cents that are broad stroke estimates without any of the real life context faced by directly impacted people and 2) we actually CAN provide relevant figures if we just thought past this return on investment paradigm and 3) we need to push the understand that this work, this research, deals with the lives of human beings and not decontextualized, abstract aggregate estimates.

We simply have to do better, ya’ll. If those of us in this space, doing this work, aren’t going to push for a more nuanced and person centered approach to this issue, who will?