[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 12 (Wednesday, February 9, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]
[Congressional Record: February 9, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]
TWO ARTICLES FROM THE WASHINGTON POST ON CORRECTIONS EDUCATION
Mr. PELL. Madam President, I would like to bring to the attention of
my colleagues two articles regarding corrections education which
appeared in the Washington Post on January 29 and 30, 1994, and I would
ask that they appear in the Record immediately following my remarks.
As I have often said, education is our primary hope for
rehabilitating prisoners. Without education, I am afraid most inmates
leave prison only to return to a life of crime. As George Will notes in
his column, entitled ``Peanut's Prison Tale,'' 97 percent of all
persons now incarcerated will someday leave prison. Two-thirds of those
individuals, however, will be returned to prison within the first 3
years.
It is for this reason that we must look to education. As Colman
McCarthy asserts in his article, ``Better 100,000 More Teachers Than
100,000 More Police,'' education equals crime prevention. Diplomas are
crime stoppers. We must recognize that education dramatically reduces
recidivism rates and that it costs much less to educate a prisoner than
it does to keep one behind bars.
With respect to Pell grants for incarcerated students, recent changes
in law made through the 1992 higher education reauthorization have
provided strong mechanisms to crack down on any abuse in this program.
For example, Pell grants cannot be used at any school which offers more
than 50 percent of its courses by correspondence, has a student
enrollment in which more than 25 percent of the students are
incarcerated, or has an enrollment in which more than 50 percent of the
students are admitted under ability-to-benefit provisions. In addition,
no prisoner under sentence without a possibility of parole can obtain a
Pell grant. These and other changes help ensure that the Pell grant
will not be misused and will, instead, be an important tool for
rehabilitation.
Madam President, I know this is still a controversial issue, but we
must maintain our commitment to corrections education. Criminals should
be sentenced and incarcerated, but let us also be concerned with their
rehabilitation so that prison does not remain a revolving door.
Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the articles be printed
in the Record.
There being no objection, the articles were ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From the Washington Post, Jan. 29, 1994]
Better 100,000 More Teachers Than 100,000 More Police
(By Colman McCarthy)
America's wardens and parole officers know what few in the
Senate and House are willing to acknowledge in the crime bill
debate: The more education inmates receive while in prison,
the less likely it is they will commit crimes on release.
Recidivism rates, which range between 60 and 70 percent in
most states, are cut by as much as 80 percent among men and
women who completed high school or college courses while in
prison. Education equals prevention. Diplomas are crime
stoppers.
As Congress finishes work on what is expected to be a $22
billion crime bill, no increased funding for education
programs is in the legislation. It's the other way. The
Senate backed an amendment--sponsored by Kay Bailey Hutchison
(R-Texas), who is currently under felony indictment for
political abuses--to deny prisoners college courses under
Pell grants.
For state programs, the same holds. In Florida, Gov. Lawton
Chiles proposed a 20 percent increase in his prison budget
while decreasing money for prison education: from $14.2
million to $13.5 million next year. The Florida Correctional
Education School Authority had asked for $35 million, a
meager amount in itself that would have amounted to less than
2 cents of every prison dollar.
America's prisons are centers of illiteracy. The
Correctional Educational Association, a Laurel, Md.,
organization with 2,800 members, estimates that of the 1.2
million people currently caged, more than 70 percent are
functionally illiterate. Only 20 percent are in education
programs. Some 98 percent of those now locked away will be
freed eventually, most within five years. If they can't read
or add, they have a dog's chance of getting even an unskilled
job.
On the last go-'round of a federal crime bill--in the
summer of 1991--a crime-prevention amendment was offered to
establish required literacy programs in state prisons. Funded
for $25 million over two years, it lost 55-39. Sen. Strom
Thurmond (R-S.C.) led the opposition, arguing that the
amendment would force ``states to spend their limited dollars
on teaching rapists and murderers rather than children.''
Those who are closer than Strom Thurmond to the realities
of illiteracy and criminals look bemusedly at the anti-crime
posturings of politicians, now on profuse display. One of
them is Jody Spertzel, an assistant editor of Corrections
Today, the monthly magazine of the American Correctional
Association. She had never visited a maximum security prison
until last summer. To interview some inmates for a story
about an education program in a state prison, she traveled to
an 1,100-prisoner facility in Craigsville, Va., about 150
miles southwest of Washington.
Of that journey and the time spent speaking with some
prisoners, Spertzel, 27, a Penn State graduate and a person
graced with an open mind, recalled last week: ``It's a day I
think of often. I believe it has influenced my life and
outlook. The reception I received, both by the staff and by
the inmates, has remained in my mind. Often I wonder if we on
the outside can't be doing more to ensure that prisoners have
better options and opportunities awaiting them when they are
released. I also wonder what I can do individually to ensure
that others do not join them. This is one of the reasons I am
choosing to change careers right now, to become a teacher.''
Spertzel has begun looking into job possibilities as a
prison teacher. Let's wish her luck--tons of it. Because luck
is about all that's available.
Others who are committed to the rational and effective
include Gail Schwartz, who is 50 percent of the Office of
Correctional Education in the Department of Education. Only
three years old and funded for $11 million, Schwartz's office
has awarded small-sum demonstration grants to 41 programs--
out of 329 applications. ``Enormous interest is present,''
she says.
Schwartz represents an enlightened kind of anti-crime
advocacy: getting genuinely tough on criminals by exposing
them to the rigor and discipline of the classroom. If calls
from the Justice Department were as loud for 100,000 prison
teachers as they are for 100,000 more police, a decrease in
crime would be in sight.
[From the Washington Post, Jan. 30, 1994]
Peanut's Prison Tale
(By George F. Will)
Jessup, Md.--Peanut is a man of few words but his gaze can
peel paint, and he frowns eloquently about something Congress
may do regarding Pell grants.
Peanut's given name is Eugene Taylor. He has spent about
half of his 42 years situated as he now is, behind bars and
barbed wire, sentenced to be plus 25 years for murder and
armed robbery. He dropped out of school in the 9th grade. The
school, he indicates, had no strong objection.
Sentimentalists who think there is no such thing as a bad boy
never met Peanut in his misspent youth.
In his well-spent years in prison he has passed the eight-
hour examination for a high school equivalency certification,
and using Pell grants he has taken enough courses for a
community college degree. But a provision of the crime bill
the Senate has passed would make prisoners ineligible for
such grants, which subsidize post-secondary education for
low- and moderate-income students.
The day Sheriff Clinton addressed Congress, which is chock
full of would-be Wyatt Earps hot to be deputized for this
latest fight-to-the-finish against crime, Peanut and some
other prisoners who have benefited from Pell grants sat
around a table expressing emphatic disagreement with the
Senate. Douglas Wiley (first-degree accessory, rape and
burglary and armed robbery), Willie Marshallel (drug
possession), Olin Fisher Bey (rape), Michael Postlewaite
(rape), William Blackston (drug distribution), and Tim
Sweeney (murder and armed robbery) are where they belong,
serving long sentences. But most of them will be paroled
someday, some of them soon, as they think of soon; before the
year 2000.
Before intellectual fashion changed, prisons were called
penitentiaries. They were places for doing penance and not
much else. Today Peanut and his associates are in what
Maryland calls a ``correctional institution.'' But
``correcting'' criminals is hardly a science and not
frequently a success. Nationally the recidivism rate three
years after release is about two-thirds.
In withdrawing Pell grants from prisoners the Senate may
have been grandstanding and chest-thumping, but it also was
responding to scarcity. Demand for grants exceeds supply, so
why should convicts be served when young people on the
outside, whose parents pay taxes to pay for prisons, are not
served? An answer may flow from this fact: 97 percent of all
persons now incarcerated will someday leave prison.
Do Pell grants for prisoners ``work''? Is educational
attainment in prison a predictor of post-prison success? That
is hard to say.
The prisoners joining Peanut around the table are a self-
selected set of achievers, not a representative sample of the
prison population. There are data showing that education in
prison-correlates with reduced recidivism. But that data may
show only that the character traits that cause a prisoner to
take advantage of prison opportunities would in any case
dispose those persons to re-enter society successfully.
Furthermore, the culture of a prison is complex. In a
spirited essay, prisoner Postlewaite suggests, as the other
long-term prisoners at the table do this day, that short-
termers are giving convicts a bad name. Many short-termers
regard prison as a rite of passage, a mere hiatus in a career
of crime. They have no incentive--the incentive of long
sentences--to buckle down to self-improvement.
``Look at the behavior of the majority of inmates,'' writes
Postlewaite. ``You would think that they were at the
community recreation center. All of their friends, relatives
and homeboys are right there with them, and they are just as
cheerful as they were in the streets.'' Having spent their
short sentences watching television, playing basketball and
making collect phone calls, they leave prison having ``no
fear on bad feelings about coming back.''
The logic of Postlewaite's argument is that the most
promising candidates for Pell grants are serving long
sentences. But they are often in for the worst crimes. That
is not politically congenial logic.
Prisoners who enroll in education programs get time cut
from their sentences. Some acquire a disquieting fluency with
the patios of pop sociology--``enhancing self-esteem'' and
``understanding societal norms''--that parole boards may find
soothing. One feels at best ambivalent when someone convicted
of a heinous crime says that education ``has made me feel
good about myself.''
But Peanut does not talk like that. And Congress should
consider the fact that Peanut may be at large in a few years,
at which time Baltimore's streets, which he left long ago,
may be a bit safer than they would be if he had not acquired
some social skills with the help of his Pell grant.
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