Inspired by a 60 Minutes story about Bard College’s providing free classes in a New York prison, an anonymous donor in Salem, Ore., has given almost $300,000 so that prison inmates in that state can take community-college classes, The Oregonian reports. The gift is helping 95 inmates who have demonstrated good behavior — and who wouldn’t otherwise be able to pay for college because prisoners are ineligible for Pell Grants — to attend Chemeketa Community College.
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One Response to Anonymous Donor Sends Inmates to College
11134193 - December 9, 2009 at 5:32 pm
11134193. Not a new concept! Organizations and individuals have been sponsoring college education programs within prison walls for more than forty years in New Jersey. In addition to providing knowledge for incarcerated men and women, such programs establish incentives for inmates to become eligible to participate. At over forty thousand dollars a year to maintain each prisoner in a state or federal facility, it sounds as though tax-paying citizens would have a fundamental interest in supporting a CORRECTIONS program which provides some opportunity for REHABILITATION. Crime leading to incarceration and the maintaining of prisoners for numerous years (as in warehousing incarcerated people) seems to be a wasteful and costly exercise in futility, when we might have a chance to reclaim at least ten percent of the presently incarcerated. That number, provided education and retraining might become contributing citizens – on the outside of institutions. Yes, they would have to be supervised for a number of years but the notion that it could be a successful way of turning potential talent to into useful citizens is more than a pipe dream! Anybody interested? Or should we just keep on building bigger and “better” prisons to incarcerate more of our citizenry?