Higher Education for Incarcerated Individuals

Deisy Ramos 

As a criminal justice and criminology major, there are a lot of topics I am passionate about and one of them involves the need to provide efficient rehabilitation for incarcerated individuals. I personally believe that education is one of the best forms of rehabilitation, which is why I chose to research how education can help reduce recidivism and help individuals reenter society. For the format of my project, I decided to create a mock bill proposal. Keeping in mind that idea of failing big, I decided it would be something very ahead of our time and something good to put together. At this time, there are discussions of whether incarceration individuals deserve any form of education in the first place and while higher education programs exist in some prisons already, making it an official law or bill that requires all prisons to provide this type of education seems imaginative. In class we have spoken a lot of social issues and injustices throughout the semester and discussed a lot of ethical questions. My question deals with a moral and ethical dilemma of should incarcerated individuals even deserve any type of education or rehabilitation? Many think that prison is a place of punishment, and rehabilitation and education would not be punitive enough. They worry that prison will become "fun" and "enjoyable". This also connects to us as students because the main ethical debate is whether it is right to provide these "criminals" with higher education when college students like ourselves have to pay and even go into debt to obtain such an education. I personally believe that many incarcerated individuals ended up in prison because we as a collective society let them down and created disadvantages. For this reason, they deserve a second chance and help to change their lifestyle upon reentry. I want to continue to push for this initiative beyond the confines of this classroom.