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Comment by SteveGerencser | Hacker News Reader

As they should. If you are going to give away a college education it should probably start with the people not in prison and even earlier before they begin to commit crimes.

I understand the desire to rehabilitate people, but when those in prison have more services and resources handed to them than the general population gets then there is a serious problem. If we started earlier in the education process and young students knew that they would be supported all the way through college / trade school / whatever, they would be far less likely to give up early thinking that they could never 'afford' to go to school so why bother.

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The national average cost to keep someone a prisoner is $31k/year.

http://www.reentryeducationnetwork.org/advocacy-platform.htm...

> New York State college in prison programs have also proven effective, with only 7.7% of incarcerated people who attended college classes re-incarcerated compared to the 29.9% recidivism rate of those who did not attend any college classes.

A 75% reduction in recidivism will pay for community college many, many times over. It's a tremendous net-win for the taxpayer, but our "hard on crime" attitudes prevent us from saving ourselves billions of dollars in damages, policing, legal costs, housing/feeding, etc.

The RAND meta analysis at your link (reference 3) rates the quality of the studies it analyzed. Among the groups that were assigned randomly (to have educational intervention or not), the reduction in recidivism was about 40%.

(I had wondered how self selection factored into the numbers...edit to add: I did not mean to suggest that the 40% I quote is directly comparable to the numbers in your post, I meant to share the factoid that the effect was strong when a quality control for self selection was present)

You assume that the group that did attend community college is the same as the group that did not. This seems, to me, questionable. After all at least those who attempt to get a college education think it is worth the work, which is likely to cause them to reoffend, no?

Ignoring that, how about the effect that if you get caught for your crime you get a free college education? Wouldn't that remove some of the downside of a life of crime.

> Wouldn't that remove some of the downside of a life of crime.

That's a problem if prison it to be primarily punitive. I'd prefer it were rehabilitative, and thus focused on "what's the best way to turn this person into a productive, positive member of society once released?" I'd also prefer a basic, community college-level education be available to all, not just the incarcerated.

I'm just glad to see that a lot of people didn't read my full comment. Hard on crime was not what I said, what I said was that there is a finite amount of money available and that when we have to choose between educating prisoners or providing an education to people BEFORE they enter the criminal system the net gain for society is even higher because you stand a far greater chance of keeping them from entering the system to begin with. Making everything else irrelevant.

> If you are going to give away a college education

Now there's an idea. Do both, give education away to everyone, including inmates.

During my parents younger days, here in Australia, a university education came at no cost to the individual. Sounds like a reasonable sort of scenario I reckon.

In Germany all public universities (which are the good ones) are free. In Holland it is not free, but Dutch citizens a sort scholarship by default. Which is arguably even better.

In my day (1980s) I got a CS degree from a decent UK University and it didn't cost me a penny - everyone got their feed paid back then and as my parents weren't very well off I got a full grant.

Turned out to be a pretty good investment for HMG going by the amount of tax I have paid... :-)

I see, so all we need to do is link up some pre-crime telepaths with accredited university entrance organizations. I'll get the professors on the phone and you get me the telepaths. We'll have a Kickstarter going by next week.

Maybe we shouldn't give prisoners free room, board, and healthcare over the public while we're at it.

There are already some attempts to charge those in custody for room, board and medical procedures, even going as far as trying to charge for involuntary procedures involved in searches. Or police requiring $3,000 for property damage for getting blood on their uniforms after beating up a guy with a different middle name as who they were looking for.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/12/us/in-riverside-california...

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/01/14/new-mexico-ma...

http://www.elpasotimes.com/latestnews/ci_26100843/aclu-woman...

http://www.npr.org/news/documents/2014/DAVISINF.PDF

I thought that Davis link was the most remarkable thing I'd ever seen. Then I Googled the back story, and found out that the officer lodging the complaint had also sworn in court that the Davis didn't bleed on him when the police department was sued, and then having somehow avoided a perjury charge, received a commendation from Ferguson City Council this year. And that one of the other officers involved is also facing a lawsuit for tasering a man to death. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/08/15/the-day-fer... http://www.fergusoncity.com/Archive/ViewFile/Item/236

If the guy died from the tasering, he was evidently just trying to avoid having to pay for the cost of the taser charge. His family should receive an appropriate invoice shortly.

The invoice got lost by The Ministry of Information when the Department of Works switched half of the tubes back to Imperial again, so someone needs to submit the appropriate forms to Information Retrieval who will then have to take it up with Information Adjustment to request a new invoice with The Ministry of Information before the next budget trimester, or a fortnight before if they wish to transfer the issuance fee for the new invoice onto the new invoice.

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