Colleagues,

I would like to welcome our guests: John Linton, Correctional  
Education, Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools, U.S. Department of  
Education; Stephen J. Steurer, Ph.D., Executive Director,  
Correctional Education Association; and William R. Muth, PhD,  
Assistant Professor, Reading Education and Adult Literacy, Virginia  
Commonwealth University.

The discussion this week is in the realm of corrections education and  
its connections with family and community education.  Together we  
guest experts and participants -- will explore what we know from  
research, professional wisdom, experience as practitioners and as  
students, about prison family literacy and about how to help inmates  
who are being released to connect with community-based education  
programs and to continue their learning until they achieve their goals.

First I would like to invite each of our guests to introduce  
themselves, to tell us about their work in this area and their  
interest in corrections education which connects with family and  
community education.

I would also like to invite you to begin posting your questions for  
our guests.  I'll begin by posting some of mine:

I would like to start with some general questions about corrections  
education before focusing on family literacy and connections to  
community education. One of the readings that was suggested was  
Locked Up and Locked Out   [ "Locked Up and Locked Out, An  
Educational Perspective on the US Prison Population," Coley, Richard  
J. and Barton, Paul E., 2006 Available on line at the ETS web site:
http://tinyurl.com/qmzfa ] I have three questions stimulated by that  
reading:
1. Locked Up and Locked Out  claims that research shows that  
“education and training programs can raise employment prospects and  
cut recidivism”  Can you elaborate on that. What is the research  
evidence? What do we know about what makes corrections education and  
training effective?

2. Steve Steurer, you have written that “Public policy on crime and  
punishment should be determined by the most effective crime  
prevention and reduction technique available through proven  
research.” (quote cited in Locked Up and Locked Out)  Can you tell us  
what are some of these techniques?

3. Locked Up and Locked Out  describes the declining investment in  
prison education. “Captive Students, an ETS report published in early  
1996, reported a decline in the resources available for education and  
training in prisons, as well as a wide variation of resources among  
the states.  According to the report, at least half of all state  
correctional institutions had cut their inmate educational programs  
over the prior five years.”  “The decline has continued. From 1990 to  
2000, the proportion of prison staff providing education fell from  
4.1 to 3.2 percent of the total staff.” What has been the investment  
pattern since 2000? Further decreases? Level, increases? Has there  
been a “turnaround” as it was predicted there would be by Marc Mauer,  
assistant director of the Sentencing Project based in Washington,  
D.C.? What are the prospects for increased funding for prison education?

David J. Rosen
Special Topics Discussion Moderator
djrosen at comcast.net



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.nifl.gov/pipermail/specialtopics/attachments/20060917/2bcf0501/attachment.html