Prison Education

As I catch up on life after being down and out for a week (combination of things) I am commenting on articles & news that I saw and heard that stuck in my mind.

One article was the statement that Gov. “Status” Cuomo was going to come up with a way to provide a college education to prisoners – 500 to be exact – because it would help reduce recidivism.

Good idea – or so it sounds. Or until you realize that there are over 50,000 people in prison in NYS. Ten percent of that is 5,000. So, 500 is really just 1% of the total.

What about the rest? What will be offered to them?

We need to ask ourselves a number of questions about prisons.

What is the purpose of prison? Is it supposed to be punishment or rehabilitative? There are people that prison ruins. And then there are people that should be (or need to be) in prison because they are that dangerous. (Pr-meditated murder, the bankers responsible for the economic crash, etc.)

Next question: How many of the 50,000 that are in prison would be better served by social workers or counselors (drug, alcohol, other types) rather than prison? That would certainly save us taxpayers money. Will we see that reform put into place? Or will we still be stuck with the bill for imprisoning people that don't need to be there?

Next Question: How many are of the mentally ill / mentally disabled and should have been in group homes or other associated care facilities instead of being out on the streets? Thank you President (sick) Ronald Reagan for that mess. No money saved there. Just an appearance.

Next question: How many of these people would not be in school if NYS (and the US) actually had schools that served students' needs and interests rather than this test and punish regime that we now have in place? (No thank you President (sic) George W Bush.)

All that being said, Gov. Cuomo rolled this out as part of a talk on “Community Schools.” This sounded to me like a back door plan to privatize schools. These schools would only be created in communities with schools that are failing. The school would be put into “receivership” (controlled by an outside entity, basically privatized) and then social services and other public services would be brought in. Why bother with the privatization? Bring in those services now! The students, their families, and their communities need them. Now. Can the politics and do what everybody knows is needed.

However, there was no talk about ending the collective punishment of teachers and students (standardized testing) which has been shown to drive down educational achievement and interest in learning. This drives down the long term possibility that our economy will recover.

There have been complaints about Gov. Coumo providing this money for the prisons but doing nothing for the rising tuition in the SUNY (public) college system. We can solve that problem by eliminating the college sports programs. In earlier blog posts I demonstrated how most of a student's tuition went to the sporting program instead of towards the actual education of the students. The funding problem for that is solved easily – Let the professional teams sponsor the college level programs like farm teams. (Think the Buffalo Bisons, et al.) There is no need for college professors to be struggling to support the programs that actually drive our economy while college sports coaches make more money than the college president. (For that matter, cut the salary of the college president. Is he teaching? No? Enough said. Current UB President Tripathi, with no experience, received more than double his predecessor. Read that twice and wonder why.)

Yes, Gov. Cuomo has a good idea to introduce more education to the prison system in order to reduce the size and scope of it. This is whacking at the leaves of the tree rather than striking at the roots of the problem.

I know that I can go into more on the need of capitalism to imprison the unemployed and a whole slew of other issues.

We all know the problems of prisons and prisoners.

Why doesn't the governor do more?

Then again, we need to ask the question – Who does he really represent?