The FIRST STEP Act will come up for a vote in the Senate this week, bolstered by bipartisan support for reducing sentences for nonviolent offenders. Much of the fanfare around the bill misses its biggest contribution to cutting crime, saving money, and improving lives: a commitment of $250 million over 5 years for training and education programs. If and when the FIRST STEP Act takes effect, the education that happens inside federal prisons will determine the outcomes we experience outside of them.
Getting released from prison doesn’t do someone much good if they’re just going to end up back behind bars within a short time. Most Americans have no idea how high the recidivism rate is. A study by the United States Sentencing Commission found that 49.3 percent of people released from federal prison in 2005 were arrested again within the next 8 years. Nearly 1 in 4 of those released were reconvicted in the same time frame.
As dismal as this is, it is not inevitable. An inmate’s level of education is an excellent predictor of how likely they are to re-offend. According to the Prison Education Project, more than half of offenders who never finished high school will recidivate; for offenders who receive vocational training, less than 1 in 3 will end up re-incarcerated. Offenders with associate’s degrees have only 13.7 percent odds of re-offending. Every increase in education causes a decrease in recidivism. That’s why education is critical to meaningful criminal justice reform.
This is obviously great for prisoners who seek better lives, but what about the taxpayers who have to fund these programs? It works out for us, too. Studies point to potentially huge returns on our $250 million investment. A 2016 report by the Council of Economic Advisers found that prison education programs could be cost-effective even if they achieved only a 2 percent drop in recidivism rates. Every federal prisoner costs taxpayers more than $31,000 per year. The fewer people who re-offend, the fewer people we end up paying to incarcerate twice.
This is a reason to invest in programs and study what works, not a reason to give away college diplomas. It would be painfully unfair to let convicted criminals get bachelor’s degrees for free while millions of people spend decades trying to pay for college. But high school is available to everyone, and it should be available to people behind bars.
To be clear, education is not the only contributing factor to decreasing recidivism. The United States Sentencing Commission found that the two biggest factors in predicting who will recidivate are age and criminal history. There is nothing anyone can do to change those things. Level of education, however, is something we can change.
More than 70 percent of all federal inmates will be incarcerated for between five years and the rest of their lives. These people are on track to be free again someday, after a significant chunk of their lives spent behind bars. A five-year gap on your resume is not an easy thing to overcome, especially without access to new technology and training. In the best case scenario, each prison is a rehabilitation center. In the worst one, it’s a storage facility for human beings.
This is an exceedingly rare policy situation in which the federal government is ahead of state governments. The vast majority of prisoners are held at the state level, not in federal facilities. Every state legislature has either just convened within the past few weeks, or will convene in early 2019. Every single one ought to consider its own version of the FIRST STEP Act. There is so much more progress to be made — but not until all 50 states decide to take the first step.
Angela Morabito (@AngelaLMorabito) writes about politics, media, ethics, and culture. She holds both a bachelor’s and master’s degree from Georgetown University.
