Policy Issues
State corrections agencies routinely collect and maintain detailed information on the status and outcomes of correctional education programs. These data—collected for a variety of administrative and judicial purposes—are seldom shared with policymakers or correctional administrators in other states, in part because no mechanism exists for centrally collecting or disseminating the information and because variations in data collection across states make comparisons difficult or impossible. By voluntarily standardizing correctional education data and reporting using a common language, state corrections agencies can create the beginnings of a national picture of correctional education and share data across state lines.
As policymakers face expanding inmate populations, they need comprehensive, reliable information that will convince them that investing in correctional education ultimately reduces recidivism, saves taxpayer dollars, and improves public safety. Such information should answer the following questions:
Policymakers and correctional administrators both need to know how their state correctional education program compares to the national average. By comparing their system with national data, they will be able to document their system’s strengths and weaknesses, identify promising practices, make program improvements, and market their successes to state and federal policymakers.
This section of the Correctional Education Data Guidebook is organized by key policy issues. Following each policy issue is a rationale for collecting the data, questions to be answered to enable federal and state legislators to develop more informed correctional education policies, and a description of the data needed to answer those questions. States’ capacity to collect these data and issues affecting database development also are discussed.
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