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This whole piece reads like it's written by someone who has never set foot in an actual, general-population prison. The scene it sets is of a collegial environment of highly motivated people who yearn to learn, and would commit themselves to pursuing a college degree, but for lack of access. In reality, a large swath of the incarcerated population is not motivated to pursue additional education, or really any program that might help them get their lives back on track. Part of it is because they frequently have underlying mental-health problems, addictions, learning disorders, or intellectual disabilities that often go undiagnosed or untreated in prison, and that must be addressed before they can get clear-headed enough to pursue their GED, let alone a college degree. Or they see a high-school or college diploma as pointless, either because they know the deck's stacked against them, or they don't know any other way of living. So, it may be completely true that higher education is correlated with lower rates of recidivism, but that doesn't mean that increasing access to education _causes_ lower recidivism. Rather, it likely means that people who are able and motivated to pursue higher education have lower rates and lower severities of mental-health issues or learning disorders, and a lack of those underlying issues predicts lower recidivism. |
Peers matter. If you stick a dumb kid who screwed up in a prison full of hardened career criminals, you're likely going to get a career criminal. Surround him with other dumb kids trying to figure out how to recover from their mistakes and something different can happen. A separate prison college serves this purpose well too.