Inmate college programs now rare
By Mary Beth Pfeiffer
Poughkeepsie Journal

Bobby Lane has a job, a wife, a house in the country -- and a life that was unimaginable not so long ago, when he was serving time for murder in a state prison.
"I consider myself no longer a prisoner of despair," says Lane, 45, of Wallkill in Orange County. "I'm a prisoner of hope."

Paroled in 1997, Lane works as a substance abuse counselor for the Volunteers of America in the Bronx. He credits his success -- New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani recently pointed to him as an inspiration for others -- to a prison program that allowed him to earn a college degree.

"My position is that education plays a very important role in a person's growth and development,'' he said. "It gives them something to work with on their release. How much can you do with a (general equivalency diploma) or high school diploma these days?"


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Eddie Ellis spent 25 years in prison, during which he earned a bachelor's degree from Marist College and a master's degree from the New York Theological Seminary. Today he is president of the Community Justice Center in Harlem, which helps ex-offenders find jobs and housing.

To people who say convicted murderers don't deserve to be educated, he says, "That's a very short-sighted, narrow-minded and self-serving argument." Why? Because most are ultimately released, and "People who acquire education are less likely to become recidivists."


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Gary Riley of Poughkeepsie was denied parole twice -- and he has no regrets.

Those four extra years in state prison, of a total of eight, helped him complete his associate's and bachelor's degree programs, allaying his fears that as an ex-felon he would be unable to support himself on release.

"Funny as it may seem, for me, prison was a blessing,'' he said. College instructors ''inspired me. They really made me see this is something I could do when I got home."

He now works locally in a professional capacity, where his past is known, but he is judged on his current abilities.


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Since 1991, 4,600 inmates have graduated from college prison programs. But the number dropped drastically in the mid-1990s, when both state and federal governments eliminated grants to prisoners for college education.

Marist College, which once ran programs in several area prisons, runs none. Dutchess Community College runs a much smaller program than it previously did, using private foundation money.

Formerly, the government grants provided about $2,500 to $3,800 annually per inmate, officials of those programs said, enough to provide faculty members for several major fields of study. The program was relatively inexpensive because overhead -- the prison facility -- was cheap, they said.

Nonetheless, "While possession of a college degree may contribute to a lower recidivism rate, the general public does not want tax dollars paying for inmates to attend college," Commissioner Glenn Goord wrote last April.

"I had to work and do whatever I had to do to get my children through college," said Dennis Fitzpatrick, a retired sergeant and public relations director for the correction officers union. "Now giving a multi-felon the same opportunity, I don't think it's fair."

Ironically, prison administrators supported the programs for their ability to help manage prisoners, said officials involved in the programs.

"It's a powerful force for peace and quiet," said the Rev. George W. Webber, director of the New York Theological Seminary Prison Program, which awards master's degrees.

"The college programs were occupying a lot of the best, more motivated inmates who also have the tendency to cause the most difficulty," said Timothy Decker, who managed the Dutchess Community College program, the state's first, for seven years.

In a 1997 report, the Center on Crime, Communities & Culture, a nonprofit advocacy group, concluded, "The more education received, the less likely an individual is to be re-arrested and re-imprisoned."

It cited studies in five states that showed much lower return-to-prison rates among higher-educated inmates, including New York.

In the New York study, published in 1991, researchers for the Department of Correctional Services found that 45 percent of those without degrees returned in four years, against 26 percent of those with degrees.

And in another study, the Center for Social Research found in 1997 that 9 percent of graduates of the New York Theological Seminary masters program were re-arrested within 28 months, compared to 37 percent of people who did not go through the program. (The privately funded program is one of the few surviving but will soon run out of candidates with bachelor's degrees, administrators said.)

"Post-secondary correctional education is one way to turn around the 'runaway train' of corrections," researcher Jon M. Taylor wrote in the Journal of Correctional Education.

Taylor calculated that recidivism costs in 1992 dropped from $1.3 million for every 100 inmates without a college education to $387,000 for every 100 with a degree, an $18 billion national savings.

For now, a handful of small undergraduate programs continues to operate -- Dutchess Community College at Green Haven, a program run by the Consortium of the Niagara Frontier at three upstate prisons, and a Bedford Hills program in Westchester County for women. In all, 70 inmates got degrees last year.

That's a far cry from 1995, when at least two dozen colleges participated in the program and 592 degrees were awarded.

"These people get out," said Ilene Bull, who directed the Marist program. "What is the impact on a family when you have someone who has a college degree versus someone who has been on welfare all their lives?"

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The Death Of Rational Thought
by: Kim Weissman

Public policy in this country is no longer premised on rational thought and educated public debate, it is increasingly being driven by fear, hysteria, ignorance, and media disinformation.
We are a nation sliding inexorably into ignorance and mediocrity. When this country was founded more than 200 years ago, the literacy rate in America was higher than any other place in the western world. After the Constitutional Convention, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, published, in the popular press, a series of articles called The Federalist, for the purpose of stimulating public discussion about the nuances of the new Constitution. The relative merits of republic versus democracy was debated from taverns to state legislatures. Many elected legislators today, presumably knowledgeable about our form of government because of their positions, actually think that we live in a democracy, and would probably be hard-pressed to explain the difference. Most adults today, including those who have graduated from elite colleges, would have trouble even understanding The Federalist, let alone debating the concepts in those documents intelligently.

Most people have never even tried to read the Constitution or the Bill of Rights, nor the prolific writings of our nation's founders that clearly explain precisely what those who wrote, debated, and ratified those documents actually meant and intended, and why. And many people don't even care. Never having been taught their responsibilities in a self-governing republic, they think that they have no reason to know any of that. People who are that ignorant are ripe targets for tyrants and political demagogues who hate the idea of individual liberty.

Because of the defective nature of education, many people think that freedom is the natural state of mankind, that government is their friend, the source of their wealth and their happiness, and should provide their health care, their retirement, and teach them how to raise their children. Most people are ignorant of the fact that powerful central governments have always been the chief source of evil to their own people, and so we eagerly adopt the mantle of the victim who needs big brother to take care of us. In taking care of us, our masters have subjugated us into the role of medieval serfs, we now work more than a third of every year to pay our tribute to government, and we are afraid to even question the politicians who steal such a massive amount of our freedom and continue to demand more.

We even have magical incantations that obviate thought, and we instantly agree to whatever crack-brained scheme is attached to those incantations; so in the name of campaign "reform" we surrender our freedom to speak; in the name of "public safety" we surrender our right to defend ourselves, and become like children cowering in corners in fear for our lives; in the name of "the environment" we surrender the right to live our lives as we see fit, and condemn untold millions to unnecessary death.

Despite their substantive ignorance, most people have been taught, in the name of self-esteem, that their opinions always merit respectful consideration regardless of how irrational, vacant, and factually flawed those opinions may be. Feelings and beliefs supercede knowledge, and ignorance is accompanied by a sanctimonious certitude of their own superiority. We have devolved into a society in which emotion rules; how we "feel" about something, whether or not those feelings are at all related to reality, is all that matters. Logical thought and common sense analysis are increasingly rare commodities. We have become like a primitive society that stages human sacrifices to ward off solar eclipses and make the rain fall.

Chemical and pharmaceutical companies are portrayed as inherently evil. And around the world children go blind from the lack of crucial vitamins; starvation continues; people suffer and die from diseases that could possibly be eliminated; and our land and our water continue to be polluted by deadly pesticides. What is the cost to society of a breakthrough pharmaceutical that was never invented? Of thousands of children who could have grown up strong and healthy but who instead grew emaciated and went blind, or simply died from starvation? Those costs are fearsome, and those costs are paid by the most vulnerable among us. Those costs are not paid by the well fed, well clothed, privileged environmental extremists who mostly live in wealthy western countries, who travel around those wealthy countries in modern transportation mobilizing equally well fed, equally well clothed, and equally privileged masses of ignorant, hysterical people into often violent protest against biotechnology. In response to people starving in the Third World, dying because they are denied access to genetically modified foods, those well fed, well clothed, and overly privileged extremists paraphrase Marie Antoinette — "Let them eat dirt!"

One of the things I've noticed lately is that the government, at all levels, seems to be going out of its way to do things that enrage the citizens. Things that if these citizens have a backbone, would cause them to rebel. Almost the way King George kept on doing things to enrage the colonists until they rebelled. Only it didn't turn out the way King George planned. Is the idea to push us so hard that we'll inevitably fight back so they can use the army to "crush us?" It's a known fact that the first people to rebel will be those most likely to rebel. It's an efficient way to get those people to "reveal themselves" so they can be "taken out." Let's look at a few of their outrages:

Child Protection: They claim that child abuse is "in crisis." That "reports" of child abuse have increased at an "alarming rate" and that "extreme measures" are necessary to combat it. Measures that violate the Constitution and rape the rights of parents. They routinely snatch children from loving parents, force the parents to "jump through many hoops" in an effort to satisfy the child protectors so they can get their children back. But they most likely have lost them forever, especially if they don't have the resources to hire lawyers and expert witnesses and fight them properly.
There are several things nobody knows, or will not admit. First, that in every case, the child protectors will try to keep the children, even if no charges can be proven against the parents, and put them up for adoption, thereby permanently severing the ties between parent and child. They get large fees from the feds for every day those children are in their custody and $4,500 to $6,000 for each adoption. Second, that 80% to 90% of those "child abuse reports" just aren't true (by their own figures). But they do get lots of "reports" because they advertise for them. They have literally hundreds of "hot lines" where people can call in and make a "report" of child abuse that is totally anonymous.

That's right: forget about the constitutional right to "confront your accuser." All it takes is an anonymous "report" to cause the child protectors to come in and ruin your life and in the end, probably destroy it. The "Good Samaritan Laws" completely protect not only the person doing the "reporting," but also everybody connected with the child protectors from any kind of "legal" retaliation, even if the report or actions of the social workers can be shown to be lies and overstepping of their authority, they usually cannot be sued. They have it all their own way, set up to keep us from being able to properly oppose them.

Part of their "advertising involves teaching your children in school that if they ever "don't like what their parents are doing, all they have to do is put in a child abuse "report" and their parents will be "taken care of." Talk about destroying parental authority! The kids don't understand how devastating this can be to their family until it's too late. If they later recant, they are simply not believed

Very informativ and interesting.Thanks for sharing.

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