On Rethinking Technical Violations and Supervision Policy for Alumni of College in Prison Programs
In response to Joshua Bay’s recently published Inside Higher Ed article, the Consortium for Catholic Higher Education in Prison, a coalition of partnerships between Catholic universities and departments of corrections in 15 states across the country, is adding its voice to those of other leaders in the field alarmed by the piece’s misleading framing: a framing that flies in the face not just of decades of established literature on the subject, but of the study (as yet unpublished and unreviewed) itself. Since misleading titles and ledes can have very real effects on people not versed in the field, it feels important to identify what exactly is misrepresentative in the article, and to invite a fuller discussion on the known and proven benefits of higher education in prison and the important questions around supervision policy and technical violations the study raises.
These tensions, and the logical issues that underlie them, are clearly acknowledged by the study’s authors themselves, both in the unpublished working paper on which the article is based and in the IHE article, “Prison Education May Raise Risk of Reincarceration” (revealingly since changed to “Prison Education May Raise Risk of Reincarceration for Technical Violations,” still a misleading title). While the article’s lede claims “[p]rison education programs are designed to help people succeed after release, but new research suggests they may actually increase participants’ chances of reincarceration,” the study’s authors, Romaine Campbell & Logan Lee, make very clear in their working paper’s abstract that the study “confirms no relationship between education and reincarceration after we control for release type,” and the remainder of the article itself acknowledges that the 3.4% increase in reincarceration among participants in Iowa is driven by technical violations — not new crimes, and not educational intervention. This reflects supervision policy, not educational failure. Technical revocations often involve non-criminal rule breaches and say more about monitoring practices than about public safety, as Campbell & Lee lay out in the article itself: “‘Work release programs are quite ineffective at achieving their goals, [and] they’re driving a significant increase in people returning to prison,’ Lee said. ‘It’s being assigned far too often at the margins, and some [incarcerated individuals] would be better off on parole or even released free and clear.’”
The data analysis therefore provides important information on the challenges of work release for students in prison education programs but not arguments against prison education programs – if anything, calling for the release of these alumni “free and clear.” That is an issue for DOC reentry and work release programs, not education, and should be taken as such. The national evidence remains unequivocal: a RAND meta-analysis still shows a 43% reduction in recidivism for those who participate in prison education, which remains the most comprehensive study in the field. Facilities with education programs report up to a 75% reduction in violence among participants, improving safety for staff, educators, and incarcerated people alike. Campbell & Lee also confirm improved employment outcomes for program participants. Employment is one of the strongest predictors of long-term desistance, so this alone is a key success indicator.
It seems likely that not just the study’s authors, but Joshua Bay and the IHE editors are aware of all this. The title’s amendment suggests as much, and the caption beneath the article’s lead photo reads like that of an article urging greater freedoms for formerly incarcerated students: “Incarcerated individuals who enroll in college courses are less likely to be released free and clear and more likely to be assigned to work release.” These points show that the Grinnell finding is not evidence of a flawed model — it is evidence of a local anomaly shaped by supervision practices, not by the educational intervention itself. Decades of research, Grinnell’s own admissions, and the lived outcomes of our students and graduates across the country all affirm that the work of higher education in prison is effective, restorative, and socially transformative. Thus, as the field draws attention to the tensions between the article’s substance and its misleading title, the study’s findings and the way those findings are framed, and as this working paper undergoes peer review and revision, we hope that fruitful conversations may grow from this around the obstacles that students face and the possibility for transformative changes to supervision policy that sets formerly incarcerated students up for failure rather than success.
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