Recidivism and Education

MORE EDUCATION LESS RECIDIVISM: RESEARCH DESIGN
After analyzing the literature review the reader can draw their own conclusion on the hypothesis: inmates who receive an education while incarcerated are less likely to recidivate when released; compared to those who are released without having received an education. That being said, the purpose of this research design is to present clear and concise methods on how the hypothesis will be tested and consequently validated. People are incarcerated because they break laws set by society to protect society, does that mean those same people will continue to break laws after completing their sentences? In the research design I will focus on one factor that might prevent recidivism: education. For the purpose of this research design, the definition of recidivism will be held to the standards of Lawrence (1994) “who views recidivism as returning to prison after once being released.” This definition does not account for the inmates that return to jail for technical infractions such violating parole/probation, or people that commit crimes and are punished in ways that do not involve prison time being served. The education levels that I will include are as follows; GED, vocational certification, 2 year degree, and 4 year degree. The inmate population tested will exclude, for obvious reasons prisoners that are on death row, serving life sentences without the possibility of parole, and prisoners that have a sentence longer than five years. The last inmate population might not present itself as obvious in why it is being excluded, which leads to the next stage of observation. The prisoners that will be included in testing are those that have committed any type of crime (to include violent, drug related, etc.) leading to a maximum sentence of five years. The main reason for the limit of five years comes from the unpublished study by Daniel Glaser (1969; 1975) Dennis J. Stevens (1997a, 1994) who caution that “the more male and female offenders are isolated from a law-abiding society and deprived of society’s amenities, the more likely it is that offenders will reject the lifestyles and laws of that society.” The hypothesis will be tested by taking samples and recording observations from prison institutions across the 50 states that implement a correctional education policy; which allow prisoners to attain the educational levels which were mentioned earlier in this research design. I will not account for any of the correctional facilities that do not implement educational rehabilitation programs. The sample size from each correctional institution will be the same, however, since prisons are gender based and/or have a disproportionate age group; the number of samples taken will be the equal in number based accordingly for each institution and the age groups of those samples will be random as to present an unbiased result. The operationalization for the concepts of my hypothesis will be broken down into procedural steps; the number of inmates taken from each correctional facility will be 60, regardless of facility population. Thirty of those inmates will be categorized as the control group and the other thirty will make up the test group. The test group will be monitored during the time that they are receiving whichever level of education they are qualified to undertake at the correctional facility in which they are incarcerated, with the level of education and completion of the program being the main focus of the observation. Inmates who do not complete the educational program continue to be part of the test group and the study observation will continue, with them being paced as an intermediate category; having undertaken some academic curriculum but not completing it, however, they will not form part of the final findings. The inmates that complete their academic goals will be monitored for a period of three years after being released from their respective correctional facilities. The data that will be recorded will be how many of those inmates recidivated after being released and if so how soon after being released. The control group will also be monitored after being released but not while incarcerated, since they will not be receiving an education. Something that should be noted will be the inmates are not asked if they would like to participate in the educational programs, they will be randomly selected after having enrolled in the educational programs of their own accord, likewise inmates that do not pursue any education while being incarcerated will not be asked to not do so. The same three years of observations and standards will apply to the control group, after the observation periods have concluded, in order to validate the hypothesis (the inmates who received and completed a correctional education and are released must recidivate less often than those who did not receive any correctional education), several previous cases (for and against) regarding correctional education and recidivism will be analyzed and compared with the findings of my hypothesis and research design to indicate its validity. One of the cases that provides indication of concurrent outcomes (of this hypothesis) is that of Ryan and Maulding (1994), who reviewed and analyzed an enormous number of articles on correctional education and recidivism and conclude that many of those articles reported a inverse relationship between correctional education and recidivism. Another case that will be investigated and whose findings will be included in the research design will be the argument against the hypothesis conducted by Clarke and Harrison (1992) which argues that offender characteristics are stronger predictors of recidivism rates than the correctional mission or organizational effect itself. In conclusion the research design is meant to validate the theory that educating inmates while incarcerated will reduce the likelihood of them returning to prison once released. If the findings of this research support the hypothesis, I believe that higher education opportunities should become a staple of the rehabilitation process for correctional facilities across the United States in order to reduce recidivism, which in turn might be associated to less crime, less money being spent on incarceration, and a better society overall.
References
Clarke, S., and Harrison, A.L. (1992).
Recidivism criminal offenders assigned to community correctional programs or released from prison in North Carolina in 1989: Report prepared for the North Carolina Sentencing and Policy Advisory Commission 1992. Institute of Government. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Glaser, D. (1969) The effectiveness of a prison and parole system. IN: Bobbs-Merrill
Glaser, D. (1975) Strategic criminal justice planning. Rockville, MA: National Institute of Mental Health.
Lawrence, D. (1994).
Inmates students: Where do they fit in? Journal of the Oklahoma Criminal Justice Research Consortium, 1, 55-63.
Ryan, T.A., and Mauldin, B.J. (1994)
Correctional education and recidivism: An historical analysis. (Report available from University of South Carolina, College of Criminal Justice, Columbia, South Carolina

References: Clarke, S., and Harrison, A.L. (1992). Recidivism criminal offenders assigned to community correctional programs or released from prison in North Carolina in 1989: Report prepared for the North Carolina Sentencing and Policy Advisory Commission 1992. Institute of Government. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Glaser, D. (1969) The effectiveness of a prison and parole system. IN: Bobbs-Merrill Glaser, D. (1975) Strategic criminal justice planning. Rockville, MA: National Institute of Mental Health. Lawrence, D. (1994). Inmates students: Where do they fit in? Journal of the Oklahoma Criminal Justice Research Consortium, 1, 55-63. Ryan, T.A., and Mauldin, B.J. (1994) Correctional education and recidivism: An historical analysis. (Report available from University of South Carolina, College of Criminal Justice, Columbia, South Carolina