Upon further studying I found that in 1995, over eighty percent of federal and state prisons offered a general equivalency diploma and offered classes to help inmates achieve this goal. At that time a quarter of all prisoners were involved in GED programs. Over forty percent of prisons were offering college credit level courses, which inmates could voluntarily participate in to achieve a two year college degree. Twenty-one percent of prisons offered classes towards a four year college degree. Unfortunately, during the mid 90’s, many grants were canceled and most expansions of prison schools and libraries denied. Even though I could not find the numbers, I suppose that all these statistics went down.

This also extends beyond college credit classes to just job training. At first glance it seems more then reasonable for job training, without it ex-cons would have no where to go when released, except back to a life of crime. It is a proven fact that job training lowers the recidivism (repeat offender) rate, especially in younger inmates. Yet fewer than one in ten inmates in the United States has a job (in prison) that might lead to employment after release. This is not only because of complaining taxpayers, objections are also raised by labor unions and private businesses. With so many people unemployed in the United States, labor unions argue that criminals should not be trained in prison at the taxpayer’s expense, just to come out of prison and take away jobs from innocent job seekers. Private businesses have an argument all to their own, for a prison to really train someone in a particular job and make it cost efficient, the prison becomes a business all on its own. And since the prison doesn't have to pay its employees (prisoners), or pays them below minimum wage, how can a private business compete. Representatives of these private businesses argue that prison run industries function and compete much like a slave labor industry would. I see their argument very clearly, but I still think that I would rather have released convicts competing for jobs than to be placed back into society with little options other than going back into a life of crime.

In 1996, researchers at the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, California, published a study comparing the effectiveness of different approaches to crime. They estimated that every one million dollars spent incarcerating repeat felons pr

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