Recidivism is a serious problem, but it appears that if persons who have been released from prison are offered educational and training opportunities, many of them will not return to lives of crime.
In today’s Martin Center article, Magdalene Horzempa looks at the evidence for that in North Carolina.
She writes:
There is a clear connection between the availability of postsecondary programming in prisons and improvements to public safety via the reduction of recidivism, and North Carolina has already caught on. Currently, North Carolina universities and the North Carolina Community College System (NCCCS), through coordination with the N.C. Department of Adult Correction, offer a wide variety of programming to incarcerated individuals across the state. With further support from Reentry 2030 and the Pell Grant system, North Carolina is paving the way for a more robust, high-quality prison-education system.
Here is one of the examples she provides, from the University of North Carolina Asheville:
UNC Asheville’s Prison Education Program (PEP) initiative has been offering liberal-arts-based educational programming in North Carolina correctional facilities since 2019. PEP provides credit courses for incarcerated individuals, with program participants starting with general-education classes including statistics, sociology, humanities, and communications. In 2024, PEP began collaborating with the Buncombe County Detention Facility to allow detainees to earn transferable college credit in courses such as Mass Communication, Introduction to Sociology, and many others.
The cost of such programs is small and the benefits are substantial.