What happens when you educate an incarcerated person? After release, “that recidivism rate, I believe, is less than 3%,” says Mark Taylor with Project Rebound at Cal Poly Humboldt. “And the state averages around 50%.” He says that it costs about $130K to keep someone in prison. “If you're going from 50% to less than 3%, that saves taxpayer dollars.”
But beyond the numbers, he says there’s another element. “You see an individual come home and really be able to step into the fullness of their destiny and never harm another person,” potentially disrupting the cycle of violence for generations.
Somewhere around 2015, a bigger picture came into focus for prison officials. The recidivism numbers led to a “mindshift”, says Kari Rexford. She’s with Pelican Bay State Prison and has helped steward education programming at the facility. “Our biggest thing is giving them the skills and the education to reintegrate into society: today's inmate, tomorrow's neighbor.” Today, inmates are taking college midterms, working on their high school GED, and learning to code. This is part II of Talk Humboldt’s exploration of what it’s like running education programs at Pelican Bay. To hear part I, click here. Full disclosure: College of the Redwoods and CR instructors are involved with some of the education programming at Pelican Bay, and Project Rebound is housed at Cal Poly Humboldt.
Photo caption: Re-purposed rooms at PBSP’s Facility D now serve as classrooms.
Photo credit: California Department of Corrections
Machine transcript:
ANNCR: Previously on Talk Humboldt…
WEBB: I've been working as a T.A. since 2013 when I got out of Pelican Bay SHU. So I got a chance to see clearly. Education changed my life and for the men who are ahead of me. I was changing their life and I said, hey - this stuff works.
ANNCR: This is Part I of our look into education behind bars. In part one, Keith Flamer of College of the Redwoods and Michael Spagna of Cal Poly Humboldt went behind bars to visit classrooms and talk directly with incarcerated students. In the interest of full disclosure, faculty from both colleges are involved with these programs, and the final episode of this mini series will look at what their job requires of them when teaching in prison. But first, the conversation turns to the big picture. How did we get here? Why educate convicted criminals? Today's guests say that it started with a mind shift that began about ten years ago from Pelican Bay State Prison. This is Talk Humboldt.
TAYLOR: My name is Mark Taylor, and I'm a coordinator for Cal Poly Humboldt’s Project Rebound.
REXFORD: My name is Kari Rexford. I am the acting principal at Pelican Bay State Prison for Tsunami Adult school.
FLAMER: Keith Flamer, president of the College of the Redwoods.
SPAGNA: And I’m Michael Spagna, interim president of Cal Poly Humboldt.
FLAMER: Can you talk a little bit about the history of prison education and, how did we get to where we are today?
TAYLOR: So first, about the macro level of prison education programs. In 1994, the crime bill passed, which made people who are experiencing incarceration ineligible for Pell Grants. And we went from a couple thousand prison education programs throughout the nation to like, less than 20. As a result of that, those laws have changed. And I believe it was 2014. And then the California Community College system is now in every prison in the state.
REXFORD: Our biggest thing is giving them the skills and the education to reintegrate into society. Today's inmate, tomorrow's neighbor. If you think about it, you have got an individual who, whether by chance or by their upbringing, something failed. It's our job to not just instantly throw them away. The goal is no longer to lock them up and throw away the key. Now if you want to talk history, in the late 1990s, to the 2000s, if you're looking at education, education was thirdly to incarceration.
FLAMER: Can you explain that for us?
REXFORD: Thirdly, meaning incarceration was first punishment. Then came, what resources we could utilize with them. Basically vocation. We utilize the inmates as workers to create things that could be sold to the public. Thirdly came education. It was mainly just to get your GED. You're done. You're good. During the late 1990s to the early 2000s, though, Pelican Bay did ramp up in its violence and a lot of that violence was occurring in the vacation areas. So they ended up closing the vacation programs around 2000 and 2001. So if you imagine from 2001 all the way through 2009, all this population had was GED. That occurred until about 2013 when thank goodness California came in to save money. That year we added six teachers.
SPAGNA: The way you're describing it is that education was not a priority. It was, like you said, third on the list and a distant third, but it didn't get to one of the things we were discussing during the tour, which is this transformation of thinking. And I think you're getting to that now, and I'll attribute this fully to our provost, Jen Capps, who was once quoted as saying, as this program started, that it was an attempt to disrupt the cycle of violence and the vocational skills were not doing that. But this other element seems to be doing some of that. It's getting people to think critically, to think about communities, being able to take different perspectives. The value of a humanities kind of notion for education?
REXFORD: Absolutely. Would you look at that time period I was discussing where there was lack of community. Everyone was individualistic all by themselves. 2015 frankly, was the shift. And that was also at the time where the MOU with College of the redwoods was being developed and not just, ‘okay, here's the college’. It's ‘let's make sure this population can handle the college’. Then going from the foundation in not just here you go. Go forward. Try it. See if you can do it. But let me give you the skills to succeed. That's where a lot of the mind shift then started. And that's what I do want a lot of people to see is not just that, /okay, we're providing you the very basics’. It's ‘there's a purpose behind it. We want you to succeed.’
FLAMER: You know, thank you for the history. I used to receive a lot of questions about why we're doing it. Like, what's the value of of educating prisoners?
TAYLOR: When you speak about the efficacy of the program itself, when you look at individuals who have graduated within at least an associates degree and have reintegrated into society, that recidivism rate, I believe, is less than 3%. And usually it's not for another crime. It's for violation of their parole and probation. And the state averages around 50%. Wow. So you figure if you're going from 50% to less than 3%, that saves taxpayer dollars. I think it's approximately $132,000 to keep someone in prison for one year. And it's a lot less to educate them.
SPAGNA: The reason to protect the investment, right?
TAYLOR: Right. If we want to enhance public safety, we want to employ programs that work. And what we do now works is prison education programs. What we also know that works, which Pelican Bay has done very well, is rehabilitative programs, right? They have rehabilitative programs on every yard that teaches everything from emotional intelligence to artwork, which helps people work on their critical thinking skills. Right. And when you partner that with the prison education program, that's when you see an individual come home and really be able to step into the fullness of their destiny and never harm another person and just go into society successfully.
REXFORD: And if you think about it, it's not just them themselves meeting their destiny. They're taking that critical thinking mindset and branching it out to their family.
TAYLOR: If I could add one thing about that, the 27 students we currently have in the bachelor's program, not a single one of them had a GED when I came to prison. Or a high school diploma, right? Every single one of them earned their GED in prison. They went on to earn their associate's degree, and now they're in a bachelor's program. There's even a student who told his daughter, I believe that she was struggling in school and told her, ‘if I enroll in College of the redwoods, I expect you to graduate.’ And that's how you break transgenerational cycles, right? Because of the parents in prison, it's more likely that the kid will be in prison unless that parent educates themself and gives the kid something to aspire to. I believe that's how you enhance public safety for generations, not just for that one individual that's experiencing incarceration, but for that person's entire family.
ANNCR: From Pelican Bay State Prison, this has been part two of talk Humboldt's look at education inside Pelican Bay. In part three, we go from the big picture down to the individual level what teaching behind bars feels like and how it's affected the prison culture.
TAYLOR: So every faculty member who works for the program, we brought them out here for our strike to see, is this an environment that you want to teach in?
ANNCR: To hear more episodes of Talk Humboldt, visit KHSU.org. Produced at Cal Poly Humboldt.
