News — Recent expansions in prison school offerings and the re-introduction of the Second Chance Pell Grant have heightened the need for a better understanding of the effectiveness of prison education programs on policy-relevant outcomes. We estimate the effects of various forms of prison education on recidivism, post-release employment, and post-release wages.
, we conducted a meta-analysis to estimate the effect of four forms of prison education (adult basic education, secondary, vocational, and college). We find that prison education decreases recidivism and increases post-release employment and wages (Stickle & Sprick Schuster, ). The largest effects are experienced by prisoners participating in vocational or college education programs. We also calculate the economic returns on educational investment for prisons and prisoners. We find that each form of education yields large, positive returns due primarily to the high costs of incarceration and, therefore, high benefits to crime avoidance. The returns vary across education types, with vocational education having the highest return per dollar spent ($3.05) and college having the highest positive impact per student participating ($16,908).
Following an explosive growth in U.S. incarceration rates starting in the 1980s, more than six in every 1,000 people in the U.S. population are behind bars, the highest rate in the world, despite many other countries having higher violent crime rates. A 2003 estimate by the Prison Policy Initiative projected that six percent of Americans would be imprisoned at some point in their lifetime, including almost one-third of all African Americans. The decision to incarcerate relatively more people comes with direct and indirect costs. One estimate (Wagner & Rabuy, ) places the cost to house prisoners at $80.7 billion, while the costs of policing, courts, health care, and various other expenses bring the total cost to $182 billion.
The indirect costs are potentially even more extensive. Incarceration decreases rates of employment (Apel & Sweeten, ) and education for both the incarcerated (Hjalmarsson, ) and their dependents (Shlafer et al., ). Because lower education levels have been found to have a causal effect on arrest and incarceration (Lochner & Moretti, ), the decision to incarcerate a parent increases the likelihood that the child ends up in prison. Levels of social engagement (Chattoraj, ) and civic participation (Lee et al., ) are negatively affected by incarceration. Just as the direct incarceration costs increased with the prison population, these indirect costs also did. These costs can be attenuated through effective policies and programs implemented within jails and prisons. If programs in prisons can provide inmates with skills that improve their post-release outcomes, they can reduce the indirect costs of incarceration and reduce the future costs of incarceration through reduced recidivism.
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