School District 428, like so many districts in Illinois, is strapped for cash. It’s facing major budget cuts this summer and is eliminating programs as a result.
But unlike other districts in the state, its students are all adult criminals and the classrooms are behind prison walls.
District 428, which offers elementary- through college-level courses to inmates in state prisons, is cutting higher-education programs at several facilities and eliminating college degree opportunities at the three maximum-security prisons. The federal government will no longer provide education grants for inmates, and the state cannot pick up the cost.
Is this in line with the state’s prison policy? No.
Dr. Magnus Seng, a criminal-justice specialist at Loyola University, calls the prison education cutbacks “good politics but bad policy.” He’s right. The sad reality is that, with moves such as this, the state’s approach to crime is increasingly at cross-purposes.
Prison officials say higher-education courses significantly reduce an inmate’s likelihood of returning to prison after he has been released. And the classes make the prison population easier to manage by helping keep inmates out of prison gangs and providing incentives for good behavior.
But the political and popular thinking on prisoners these days has little to do with such concepts as incentives and reduced recidivism. A pervasive “get tough” mentality on crime has made it easier for state lawmakers to avoid creatively addressing the complex problems posed by a huge prison population.
That population has been growing steadily for decades, and the “truth in sentencing” law recently passed by the legislature is guaranteed to give it a boost by requiring that longer sentences be served for certain classes of crime.
On top of that, non-violent offenders and small-time drug offenders serving state-mandated sentences are swelling the ranks of an already dangerously overcrowded prison population.
One has to question what the state is planning to do with all these people. Just keep locking them up year after year while eliminating programs that might rehabilitate them? That doesn’t make much sense, morally or economically.
Far better for the state to explore alternative punishments for non-violent and some first-time criminals, including drug offenders, and to concentrate rehabilitation programs on those inmates most likely to benefit from them when they are released.
Educational opportunities for inmates represent only a small portion of the larger prison puzzle–a puzzle the legislature has to solve before the pieces cease to fit together at all.
