Six House Democrats have proposed a bill that would allow both state and federal prisoners to be eligible for Pell Grants, the Daily Caller reports.
Their Restoring Education and Learning (REAL) Act would reverse a 1990s ban on prisoners participating in the federal grants.
The bill comes just as the U.S. Department of Education also prepares to roll out small exemptions to the same ban, starting this summer.
“Studies have shown that reinstating Pell Grant eligibility for state and federal prisoners will reduce future crime and save more in future costs of incarceration than the Pell Grants cost,” Democratic Rep. Donna Edwards said in a statement. “We have a choice: reduce crime and save money, or suffer increased crime and spend more money. This bill chooses to reduce crime and save money.”
In Edwards’ press release on the bill, she cites statistics from spending on prisoner Pell Grants before the 1994 ban. “From 1972 to 1995 prisoners who were not sentenced to death or life without parole could apply for Pell Grants…The total funding for prisoners up to that date, nine months into the school year, was $34.6 million out of $5.3 billion for the program overall. This was a very small percentage of funding that made an outsized difference.”
The issue of federally-backed education for prisoners has long been contentious—and just last year, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo halted plans to fund prison education after public uproar.
But as conservatives look for new ways to reduce mass incarceration and out-of-control spending on prisons, such measures may have more of a chance.
A much-cited 2013 study from the RAND Corporation found that, due to education’s effect on inmate employability and other factors, inmates who received correctional education were 43 percent less likely to be re-incarcerated within three years of their release.
Earlier this year, an inmate at New York’s notorious Attica Correctional Facility penned a NYT editorial making the case for better access to education.
“Education was once an integral part of prison life,” he wrote, describing extinct college degree programs for prisoners. “When the colleges left, the hope did, too, and when uneducated prisoners get out, they often come back. “
