Plenty of blame to go 'round for prison failures
By Alice Felts
Often times readers will respond to our news articles. Sometimes they read them in the newspaper, on our Web site, or even on other Web sites that post our stories.Recently, I got an e-mail from reader Pam Carpenter, from the southern part of the commonwealth. She had read an article I wrote last year on prisoners' use of the Internet for education courses, posted on www.community.discovery.com. And she had some interesting points to share. We arranged to talk on the phone.
Carpenter is an educator, and we talked about various educational theories and trends and student needs. It seemed like we shared similar philosophies. She had a mother who supported her quest for further education. So did I. She had diverse career choices in her life — so did I. She developed “train the trainer” programs for state agencies and had also worked as a journalist; me, too.
Carpenter told me that she is finishing her master's degree in special education. I already have one. She wants to get her doctorate; I have one of those, too.
She has a criminal record; I don’t. That’s where the similarities end.
Her record gets in the way of employment. And this was the point of her e-mail to me.
“Internet access for academic purposes is a nice start,” she wrote, “but it’s not even close to meeting the societal needs of offenders returning to the community.”
She points to her own personal experience, “I have worked hard to overcome the mistakes of my past, but it seems that no matter how long I continue to do the right thing, society (or at least, employers) continues to see only who I was nearly a decade ago in another state. The Department of Correctional Education is a wonderful agency, making dedicated and excellent efforts at habilitation and rehabilitation in the prison systems, but all the good that they accomplish is tarnished by the attitudes of employers with regard to hiring former offenders.”
Carpenter knows very well the inner workings of the Department of Correctional Education. Wanting to use her own life experiences and mistakes to help other offenders get their lives straight, she decided to further her own education after her incarceration. And in doing so, she now makes educational presentations to the prison population on various topics from addiction issues to literacy to strategies to improve memory retention.
She has recently developed specific curriculum for youth offenders that she is pitching for prison adoption.
Carpenter is mostly concerned with the issue of employment for former offenders — and for herself.
Her goal is to have a permanent position teaching in the prison environment. But she is having a hard time finding such employment. She knows that she is not the only one having such difficulties,
“The ability of an employer to ask about former convictions once a person has already served his or her sentence is highly similar to a situation of double jeopardy — the former offender is convicted over and over again for the same offense, and then sentenced to a life of unemployment or underemployment.”
That may account for the discouraging rate of recidivism, a relapse of an offender into criminal activity.
A 2004 Center for Impact Research study, “Current Strategies for Reducing Recidivism,” indicated that two-thirds of released inmates will be re-incarcerated within three years.
The research showed that “education is reported to reduce recidivism by 29 percent with the completion of high school education found to be the most pervasive need.” It goes on to note that increasing enrollment in such educational programs “would improve the employability of participants upon release.”
Carpenter takes a more realistic approach. “If a person is doing all of the right things and making an effort to live a productive life and fails to do so because he or she can’t get a job and is forced to return to crime for survival reason, who bears the blame for that?” she wonders.
There are state and federal efforts that are attempting to help foster employment for offenders. The Virginia Community Action Re-Entry System, known by most as Virginia Cares, helps with job development, placement and retention, among other post-release related services.
The federal government has several programs to ultimately help former offenders in the job hunt, a couple of these directly benefit the employer in the provision of fidelity bonding insurance coverage and federal tax credits as an employer incentive.
With those resources in place, I hadn’t asked myself the question Carpenter posed regarding blame. I always believed that with a good education and directed effort, a person could do anything. Now, I’m not so sure.
Felts covers education for the Times-Democrat.