Why Prisoner Education Is Key to Reducing Crime

In August, the RAND Corporation released a meta-analysis confirming what criminal justice researchers have been reporting for years: Educating people while they're behind bars makes them a lot less likely to return to prison once they get out. Specifically, RAND found that inmates who participated in correctional education programs were 43 percent less likely to become repeat offenders than inmates who didn't.

When it comes to making cities safer, decreasing the odds of former prisoners re-offending by almost half has the potential for a huge impact. But education is also a difficult service to provide behind bars. One of the downsides of having the largest incarcerated population in the world—both per capita and in real numbers—is that the participation rate of prisoners in educational programs has actually declined, according to RAND's study. At the federal prison level, a 2012 GAO report found that the number of people waiting to get into basic prison literacy programs was almost equal to the number of people in those programs. Access to anything beyond the most basic education programs is even more scarce: Between 1995, the year Congress revoked Pell Grant access for prisoners, and 2005, the number of post-secondary prison programs for inmates fell by more than 90 percent.