When Andrew M. Cuomo, governor of New York, proposed in February spending about $1-million of the state’s annual $140-billion budget to help give prisoners access to a college education, he may not have expected a bipartisan backlash. But that’s what he got.
On April 1, during a news conference to discuss the state’s budget, Mr. Cuomo said he would no longer pursue public money for degree-granting college programs in penitentiaries. He cited opposition from both Republicans and Democrats. Instead, Mr. Cuomo said he would solicit private money for the program.
Despite that setback, advocates of higher education in prison say they are encouraged by a rebirth in political interest in the cause. “For the first time in 20 or more years, the wind is at our backs,” said Max Kenner, executive director of the Bard Prison Initiative, a privately funded program that grants Bard College associate and bachelor’s degrees to inmates in six New York prisons.
Forty years ago, prisoners who were not sentenced to death or to life without the possibility of parole were allowed to participate in the then-new Pell Grant program. Prisoners who sought degrees could also tap state money, such as New York’s Tuition Assistance Program. But in 1994, with budgetary concerns and a harder line being taken on crime nationwide, a federal law barred prisoners from receiving federal money to attend college. States soon followed with their own legislation. In 1995, 350 prisons nationwide offered degree-granting college programs. A decade later, that number had dropped to 12, all of which were privately funded.
Financial Limits
While all states still pay for GED and vocational-training programs, and some offer college coursework, there are no publicly financed degree-granting college programs in correctional facilities in the United States, according to a Cornell University report.
New York spends $60,000 per year to incarcerate one person, Mr. Cuomo said when he announced his plan to put public money toward college courses for inmates in 10 state prisons at a price of about $5,000 a year per prisoner. “We call it the Department of Corrections—that’s what we call our prison system,” he said. “Are we really correcting anything? And what are we accomplishing for all that money?”
Many of the college programs available in prisons are offered on a volunteer basis by colleges themselves. Mr. Kenner launched the Bard program as a student-volunteer organization in 1999; it became a degree-granting program in 2001.
Responding to the federal and state cutbacks, several Cornell professors volunteered to offer courses in the Auburn Correctional Facility. In 1999 the university began to offer the classes for credit, tuition-free. Private grants allowed the program to expand in 2009. Cornell faculty members and graduate students teach 12 courses each semester at Auburn Correctional Facility and Cayuga Correctional Facility, in which prisoners can earn credits toward associate degrees from Cayuga Community College.
But financial constraints limit the program’s reach.
“If there were some sort of loan or grant available for people who are incarcerated to pay for tuition costs, that would make it much more possible for us to offer broader programs,” said Robert Scott, director of Cornell University’s Prison Education Program. “But right now that’s as far as our budget carries us.”
The Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit group, started a three-state public-private partnership in 2012 to demonstrate to policy makers that educating prisoners would reduce recidivism and, thus, allow states to reduce correctional budgets.
California’s attorney general, state higher-education officials, and Ford Foundation representatives this month outlined plans to restore inmate higher education with public-private partnerships in California during an event in Los Angeles.
During the event, Kamala D. Harris, the attorney general, announced a pilot program in recidivism reduction that will pair the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department with the Los Angeles Community College District to offer college courses. It will also create re-entry services like employment and life-skill services.
‘Cons Before Kids’
“This does not have to be a politically charged issue,” said Douglas E. Wood, a program officer at the Ford Foundation’s Higher Education for Social Justice initiative. “A lot of the people that are in these programs want to have a second chance in life and really want to contribute to their communities.”
Despite evidence that educating prisoners reduces crime and can be cost-effective, college-for-prisoners proposals tend to draw predictable, colorful opposition.
James N. Tedisco, a Republican member of the New York State Assembly, said Mr. Cuomo’s proposal would turn “a bunch of Jesse Pinkmans into Walter Whites"—an implication, referring to the television series Breaking Bad, that higher education in prison would only make prisoners smarter criminals.
In a petition he circulated titled “Hell No to Attica University,” New York State Sen. Greg Ball, a Republican, called Mr. Cuomo’s proposal a “slap in the face” to law-abiding families that struggle to send their children to college. State Sen. Ted O’Brien, a Democrat, agreed. “However well-intentioned, I cannot support a policy that would divert resources away from helping students in good standing and their families afford a quality education,” he said.
In Washington, Republican U.S. Reps. Thomas W. Reed, Chris Collins, and Christopher P. Gibson, all of New York, introduced the “Kids Before Cons Act” in February. The legislation—which hasn’t gained any traction toward passage—would ban funds from the Department of Education or Department of Justice from being used on college courses for incarcerated people. Such an argument is a “gut reaction” and ignores the social benefits of educating inmates, said Lois M. Davis, a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit policy group.
Of the 700,000 people who leave federal and state prisons each year, about half will be reincarcerated within three years, according to a RAND study released in August 2013, which analyzed the effects of education on prisoners. Inmates who participated in education programs, including GED and technical training, were 43 percent less likely to return to prison than were those who did not participate.
Overall recidivism rates are high for many social and economic reasons, the report said, but chief among them is a lack of education and skills.
“I think a lot of people forget about the very significant disadvantaged and underserved population which is incarcerated people,” said Sanford J. Ungar, president of Goucher College, which started the Goucher Prison Education Partnership with private funds in 2012 to offer degrees to inmates.
“The body of evidence is enormous showing that one thing is cheaper and more effective than anything else, and that’s a degree-granting college education,” said Mr. Kenner, of the Bard Prison Initiative. Its graduates have a recidivism rate of 2.5 percent, he noted.
Private support has helped the Bard program grow to enroll 275 incarcerated men and women, with an array of more than 60 courses each semester. Still, every semester “is filled with existential doubt,” Mr. Kenner said, because the program’s funds are not guaranteed from year to year.
As a result, restoring state support for higher-education programs in prisons is the focus of “a big push right now by philanthropy,” RAND’s Ms. Davis said. The budding public-private programs are not only a way to augment those run by colleges, she said, but also can demonstrate that prisoner-education efforts are effective and “ultimately will help make the case to state policy makers why it’s important to continue to support these programs.”
A Form of Activism
In the wake of Mr. Cuomo’s announcement that New York would seek private support for its proposed programs, “the state has received a number of inquiries from foundations and other philanthropic sources” asking how they can help, said Elbert Garcia, a spokesman for the governor’s office. “State officials are discussing the initiative with these potential partners and will continue to work with local nonprofits, foundations, and other stakeholders.”
Just across the Hudson River, New Jersey is one of three states, along with Michigan and North Carolina, participating in the Vera Institute of Justice’s Pathways From Prison to Postsecondary Education Project. Philanthropies, including the Ford Foundation, the Sunshine Lady Foundation, the Open Society Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, contributed a total of at least $1-million to each state to help establish degree-granting college programs in prisons and post-release programs, on the premise that the states would allocate 25 percent of the project’s total funds.
On May 8, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey announced an expansion of his state’s program, which offers associate and bachelor’s degrees in social sciences from Rutgers University in six of New Jersey’s 13 state correctional facilities. With a current enrollment of nearly 500 inmates, the program will expand over the next four years to serve 2,000 inmates in 10 facilities, he said.
Fred Patrick, director of the Vera Institute program, said the RAND Corporation would analyze the five-year project’s effectiveness in each of the states, with results available by 2018. Because the project involves credit-bearing courses, RAND will be able to “dig into the details of what worked and what did not work,” Mr. Patrick said. “This whole demonstration project is, How do you build the evidence and the public will and the public support to ultimately get public funding for this?”
Unless public support returns for prison college programs, Mr. Ungar said,
Goucher, for one, will continue its own initiative. Along with being a form of community service, he said, the prison education program also serves as a form of activism. “I suppose one could describe it as altruistic. I hope we haven’t reached a point where altruism is suspect in this culture.”
Mr. Scott, of Cornell, said colleges are interested in prison education “because they are sensing a little bit of change in our country in thinking about people who are incarcerated. They are still people. Almost all of them come back to our communities, and we have some responsibility to treat them like humans.”
During a conference at the White House in January, Mr. Ungar said, he spoke with other higher-education officials who expressed interest in establishing their own prison programs. “There are quite a few other institutions trying to figure out how to do this,” he said. “We don’t need or want to be the only ones on the block.”
