Correctional Education Data Network

What Is the Cost of Correctional Education?

States invest substantial resources in corrections. Data on correctional education expenditures can provide important information on states’ relative investment in education services and how this investment is changing over time in relation to other costs in corrections. For policymakers to make informed budgetary decisions, they need timely information about how funds are being used. Specifically, they will need answers to a number of important questions, including:

State Corrections Budget Information—the annual operations expenditure for state correctional facilities.

What is the per-inmate expenditure on correctional education, and how has this changed over time?
What proportion of total correctional facility expenditures are invested in educational services?
What proportion of correctional education resources can be traced to federal sources? State or local sources? Other sources?
Are higher rates of state expenditures associated with increased inmate participation and success in correctional education?

Variables

Tracking expenditures for correctional education will require standardizing state data collection and reporting around the following data elements:

State Corrections Budget Information
Variable	Reference in Data Codebook	Variable Name
Total Correctional Facility Expenditures	Total Correctional Facility Expenditures	TOTEXP
Correctional Education Expenditures	Correctional Education	EDUCEXP
Non-Correctional-Education Expenditures	Correctional Facility Administration Security and Institutional Operations Health Services Information Technology Community Corrections	ADMEXP SECEXP HTHEXP INFOEXP COMEXP

Standardizing State Reporting

State expenditures for correctional education programs are difficult to quantify because of differences in state accounting procedures and the various funding streams that support instructional programs. To improve reporting on correctional education funding:

States will need assistance in identifying, categorizing, and quantifying educational funding streams.

State expenditures for correctional education programs may flow from various federal, state, local, and private agencies, not all of which are tracked in the same database. States will need assistance with establishing a common approach to compiling and quantifying data from the various funding streams to report accurate costs of correctional education programs.

States will need assistance in tracking expenditures.

States have some discretion in how they allocate resources across correctional education programs. They will need assistance in developing an institutional database that tracks and quantifies the relative expenditure of correctional education resources by function.