If I have a college degree felon vs. a college degree non felon, who am I hiring?
Hell, if I have a college degree felon vs. a GED recipient, who am I hiring?
When is 'Murica 2.0 coming out? This nation is so ass backwards it’s insane.
Get them an education, make them pay it back.
if they stay out for + 10 years waive some of their bill.
If they go back, make them work it off.
Or make them pay non-criminals student loans…If they stay out of jail, the amount can decrease.
We put forth so much effort towards the undeserving, it’s getting to the point where bettering yourself only helps out those who don’t want to.
Just get rid of their bill? They are still getting free tutiton for commiting a crime. I hate all this bullshit of people complaining about student loans and finding ways out of paying them back. You borrowed the damn money, and you are responsible for it. No one made you make that piss poor decision. What makes you think a criminal will pay back a loan, especially if it doens’t work out as they would have liked.
I agree with the idea the prison is for punishment not for rehab. IMO its way to nice in prisons. The fact that 75% of the inmates have better living conditions in the joint that at their previous residence is mind boggling.
Make penalties for non-violent crimes more community service, and financially based so the number of prisoners is kept down. That would solve a ton of these problems to begin with, cutting down on the not so serious criminals in jail.
If they really want some program for eductation make the inmate work off the cost of schooling. Setting up a job system like that will cost $$ too but hopefully the cost of setting that up will be less than the burden of inmate tution on the taxpayers.
I’ll admit I was totally against this when I first saw the headline but then I read this part while trying to get a little more info on it:
A small program known as the Bard Prison Initiative, which is privately funded, provides college-level courses to a small group of inmates at six prisons across the state. Cuomo aides say that recidivism rates for those who went through the Bard initiative is 4%, compared to overall 40% for rate statewide.
So now I’ll move my opinion to on the fence. I’d like to know more about this small group that was part of the Bard program. Were they random samplings or were they picked because they were already unlikely to re-offend? If they were just lottery picked random prisoners a program like this is definitely worth considering. It costs $60k a year to keep someone in prison vs $5k a year for this college in prison program. If you can consistently knock the recidivism rate down from the current 40% to single digits just the money saved from decreased incarceration costs is huge. Add in the other benefits like reducing crime and adding more contributing members to society and it looks like a wise investment.
The problem I have is I seriously doubt the prisoners that were in the trial Bard program were likely to re-offend in the first place. They were more likely hand picked specifically because they were the least likely to re-offend. If that’s the case I’d like to see another trial program run with a random lottery sample of prisoners. If this second group doesn’t show a significant improvement from the average 40% recidivism rate then scrap the program and move on. If it works then start looking at options to have this work more like a college loan system.
Explain how NY can figure out the cost to be 5k a year for a criminal to get a bachelors but going to UB is something like 10-15k :lol:
Maybe they should put whoever kept the cost down in charge of the SUNY schools?
My issue with this don’t fucking end up in jail lots of people do everything right in life and struggle to pay for college now people who fucked up get a free ride.
This is not my argument, although if there was someone else or some way to get out of paying them I would seek it. My point is we’re tossing money at prisoners to get an education, when actual productive members of society are paying out of pocket to get a better education. It’s like getting great reviews at work and then managment giving a promotion to the guy who’s always late, doesn’t do much work and is stealing office supplies.
Also calling a college degree a “piss poor decision” is about the dumbest fucking thing I’ve heard all day.
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This
Thanks facebook
LOL^
Yea it really pisses me off how the country has gone from “hard work pays off” to “f work, someone will pay it for you”
I have a college degree, I have student loans and I would do that same thing all over again. The piss poor decision wasn’t the college degree. It was insinuating that the person that bitches about their crazy student loan probably didn’t do very well in school / got a degree that isn’t all the useful so now they are stuck with the payments and don’t have a great job.
A college degree is a poor decision if its in a weak unemployable major
Or if you have lower than a 3.9 GPA, there are thousands of people ahead of you in line for a job. The cost-to-job ratio is insane these days.
I say give 'em all Caddy’s. They might actually use them.
Get a Liberal Arts degree they said, there will be many jobs they said…
Or if you’re unwilling to move/compromise. Education degree is pretty useless in NYS right now, but down south they’re desperate for teachers.
:tup:
Even outside of NY teaching doesn’t pay off for a long time.
High schools show college as the only option and don’t even mention trades a number of which would provide a good middle class income. I’m pretty sure this applies to the prison situation I don’t see many people coming out of 4+ years of prison with a bachelors and getting a job at any legit white collar company. However training them for a specific trade should yield much better results.
This. Everyones knee jerk reaction is to say fuck this or this is such bullshit/nanny state nonsense, whatever. If this is going to create a net positive by reducing the burden on the rest of our taxes by limiting repeat offenders, and having them contribute to the tax base by being productive members of society, you’d have to be an idiot not to see the value of that.
And free sodomy, enjoy your stay!
I would assume this worked well on a small select group of inmates it will not scale well. I have no doubts you would see that 4% number shoot up the larger the program grows.
I’m sure at one point welfare was a great idea to get people back on their feet.
Possibly, we’d need to look into it more to see if this worked because the inmates selected were less likely to be repeat offenders like JayS said, or if this could potentially be scaled up with any measure of success. But when people dismiss it right off the bat because the idea of prisoners getting free college education feels wrong, you’re potentially ruining a positive financial move for the country because of your feelings.