prisoners want more college prison programs: young black prisoner in orange garb looking at something

Opinion: Education-minded prisoners thirst for more college prison programs 

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For a chance to earn a college degree while he’s incarcerated, Quantae has traded the matching color scheme and single-person cells of Lee’s young adult unit for concrete-gray quarters the size of a small bathroom that he now shares with another man at Ridgeland Correctional Institution. There he’s been able to enroll at Clafin University, the only college in our state currently using federal Pell Grants for prison education. He had to leave behind the supportive community he’d been a part of at Lee.

White woman with long dark hair sits at a round table, teaching juvenile offenders, whose faces are not fully shown, inside a New Jersey juvenile facility.

At detention facilities offering high school diplomas, college classes are seen as a next step

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Four years ago, a social worker from the Middlesex County Juvenile Detention Center asked English professor Alexandra Fields, of nearby Middlesex College, if she would be able to provide college programming for youth incarcerated at that New Jersey facility. Beyond helping them earn their high school diplomas, it offered nothing more  educationally to those graduates. In mid-February 2022, 20 young men across eight of the facilities started working on an associate’s degree from Middlesex, becoming the first such cohort in New Jersey to be on a path toward a college degree.

Vera Institute Report: American Taxpayers Spent Nearly $39 Billion Last Year on Incarceration

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Last week, the Vera Institute of Justice’s Center on Sentencing and Corrections and Cost-Benefit Analysis Unit released a new report entitled The Price of Prison: What Incarceration Costs Taxpayers. The report analyzed data from 40 states, estimating the total price American taxpayers paid in 2010 to fund corrections budgets, employee benefits, capital costs and healthcare services for inmates. The study projects that taxpayers paid almost $39 billion in the 2010 FY, which was more than $5 billion more than what the official corrections budgets originally projected. According to the report, Americans paid almost $2 billion to fund retiree health care programs for corrections employees, with another $1.5 billion going to fund state contributions to retiree health care and employee benefits, including health insurance. The report also factored in a number of other costs outside state corrections’ budgets that were funded by public dollars, including inmate services, legal judgments and claims, private facility costs and overlapping statewide administrative costs.