Corrections and Educating Our Prison Inmates

Corrections - Areal IV

Patrick Munaro

CRJ 190 – Dan Okada

April 21, 2014

Our correctional system suffers from many criticisms, particularly in areas of rehabilitation, low education levels of inmates, and recidivisms rates. I think the current punishment standards we have is the wrong approach and the purpose of rehabilitation is generally rhetoric to make people feel confident in the effectiveness of our correctional system. I advocate that we move away from the goal of punishment and transition to a goal of discipline. Punishment and discipline are they not essentially the same thing? Looking at the true meaning of the word discipline, its Latin root comes from the word disciplina, which means instruction or to teach. Discipline truly means to teach, despite modern perceptions of the word. Teaching should be the goal of our correctional system, not punishment. I advocate that the correctional system shift its central concept from punishment, to education. We shall examine empirical data on current recidivism rates, the effects of education on inmate job success and its connection to recidivism, and the reasons we should institute mandatory education as the central framework in the correctional system.

It is known by criminal justice scholars that the better educated a person is, the lower the risk that they will become imprisoned. According to my CRJ 106 professor Jack Karver, the propensity for criminal activity does indeed correlate with education levels, among other factors. Also known, is that inmates in our prison systems are generally poorly educated. As of 2000, the state with the third largest prison population is Florida. Nearly 80% of the prison inmates in Florida have less than a 9th grade literacy level (Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability, 2000). This leaves 20% of inmates that may have had some high school level of literacy and even fewer that progressed past high school. These statistics leave a

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