What Are the Outcomes of Participation in Correctional Education?

A primary purpose of correctional education programs is to equip inmates with the knowledge and skills needed to be successful in the workforce and society. This has been shown to reduce recidivism, thus increasing public safety and reducing state costs associated with rearresting, reconvicting, and reincarcerating repeat offenders. However, the challenges associated with collecting post-release data and aggregating data across states limit what we know about recidivism to individual state studies that do not provide a national picture.

Quantifying the number of inmates who successfully return to society is perhaps one of the most important contributions that state data analysts can make in analyzing correctional education data. As policymakers evaluate the effect of correctional education on the recidivism rate, they need data on inmates’ course completion, degree/certificate attainment, and employment within a certain period of time after incarceration.

These data could be used to address the following policy questions:

• Inmate Program Completions and Outcomes—degree/certificate or skill level gain achieved by
  inmate.
  
  
• What percentage of inmates participating in correctional education completes their courses or programs?
  
  
• How do completion rates differ across correctional education programs?
  
  
• How many inmates earned a degree or certificate?
  
  
• How many inmates showed skill increases?
  
  
• What are the characteristics of inmates who complete an education program?
  
  
• How does participation in correctional education affect recidivism?
  
  
• Inmate Employment Outcomes—employment status before and after incarceration.
  
  
• How many inmates get and retain a job after being released?
  
  
• How does correctional education participation affect employment outcomes?
  
  
• How do the post-release earnings of correctional education participants compare to those who did not receive any educational services while incarcerated?

Variables

To respond effectively to policymakers’ questions about recidivism, states will need to standardize reporting around data on inmate program completion and employment outcomes, including:

Standardizing State Reporting

All states track the outcomes of their correctional education programs. These outcomes may vary across states not simply because one correctional program is more successful than another, but also because states use different criteria for program placement and completion. An accurate assessment of program outcomes is also limited by the difficulty states have with collecting inmate employment data. To improve reporting and the ability to aggregate outcome data at the national level, states should address these issues, described in more detail below.   Until these issues are addressed, however, the differences between states should be noted in any assessment of program outcomes that is conducted.

1. Program completion rates may differ among states as a result of different program placement criteria.
   
   States assign inmates into academic coursework based on their performance on standardized tests administered upon incarceration or prior to enrollment. Differences in how states use data to assign inmates have implications for program outcomes. For example, states that set relatively high thresholds for ASE participation (e.g., students scoring 9.0 or above on the TABE) may appear to have higher completion rates or GED attainment rates than states serving a more educationally challenged population (e.g., students scoring 6.0 or above on the TABE). One way to standardize reporting may be to focus analyses on students scoring above an agreed-upon threshold to ensure that all states are measuring outcomes from comparable student populations.
   
   
2. States may set different scoring thresholds for attainment of a GED certificate.
   
   States may set a composite passing score higher than the current GED passing score for use by the states’ correctional education programs. These differences could have implications for the number of GEDs awarded in each state. States may wish to identify the different thresholds and how the differences affect the number of GEDs awarded across states.
   
   
3. Program completion rates may differ among states because of differences in curriculum and completion requirements.
   
   States may establish different curriculum and completion requirements for some correctional education programs. For example, a Life Skills seminar may consist of a two-hour class in one state, versus a six-week commitment in another. These differences in curriculum and intensity have implications for program outcomes. For courses offered in most correctional facilities that do not result in a degree or certificate, states should consider using common curriculum and completion standards.
   
   
4. States may assign inmates with special learning needs into regular academic courses.
   
   Inmates with special needs may face greater challenges completing program coursework. States mixing inmates with learning disabilities or language deficits with regular correctional education participants (federal law has established a number of mainstreaming requirements for individuals with learning disabilities) may appear to have lower completion rates because those with special learning needs often require additional instruction to make the same gains as other inmates. Controlling for participant characteristics can assist states in differentiating outcomes for inmates with special needs from other participants, providing a more accurate measure of program completion.
   
   
5. Inmate employment and income data is difficult for states to obtain. 
   
   While states are generally able to collect employment data on inmates who have been paroled, they are much less successful tracking the employment status of inmates once they are released from supervision.  States therefore should consider building their capacity to match data across state administrative databases.  This would require addressing various obstacles, including the accuracy of inmate-reported Social Security numbers (SSN), the quality of centralized databases in other agencies, the reliability and use of SSN as a unique identifier within these databases, state technical capacity to conduct matches, and state privacy laws.  While overcoming these obstacles would require considerable effort, a better tracking system would provide states with valuable information about ex-offenders’ reintegration into the community.