Synopsis
There is a simple and inexpensive solution to many of our country’s most pressing problems: Prison Education. Educating our prisoners has proven to be the most effective and the least costly answer to reducing recidivism – and if we can reduce recidivism by even a modest 10% we can reduce our national and states’ budgets by $60 billion to $70 billion every year! We can reduce crime significantly and make our communities safer. And we can transform wasted individuals who know no other way to survive except crime into productive, tax-paying citizens who support their families and get them off welfare, citizens who live as consumers, further supporting the national economy. People who have been educated almost always see to it that their children are educated, so it would mean a continuing decrease in crime and expenditures for new prison facilities year after year.It works! It’s been studied. It’s been proven. And, sadly, it’s been ignored. Today, prison education is almost non-existent. In the face of overwhelming evidence, policy makers and the general public still do not support post-secondary higher education in prisons. Year after year, even basic correctional educational programs are further reduced. Computers are not allowed. The results? Prisoner unrest and violence. Then we need even more money for additional security. This book was written to explain the enormity of its impact, not just on prisoners, but on our entire society and our nation’s prosperity and safety, in the hope that greater understanding will result in wise legislative action for our common good.Prison education is a concept whose time has come. It is time to stop studying the issue and stop discoursing. It is time to start the ball rolling and do something about it.
À propos de l?auteur
Christopher Zoukis, a passionate advocate of education for prisoners, is himself incarcerated in a medium-security federal prison. He teaches writing courses to fellow prisoners, and he has been aggressively pursuing an advanced education from Ohio University where he maintains a 4.0 gpa. He does not allow incarceration to waste his years or halt the progress of his life. “I may have come to prison as a confused kid who had made poor decisions,” Zoukis says, “but through education, I became determined to create a better life. We can’t let the past define us. We have to do something today to make tomorrow what we want it to be." Zoukis is also a staff writer for 3 legal publications: the State and Federal Criminal Law Review, the Texas Criminal Law Review, and The Update: Federal Criminal and Immigration Law. He is the winner of two 2011 Pen American Center Prison Writing Awards (one in drama and the other for fiction) and is an approved reviewer for the New York Journal of Books and for Blog Critics.com. His work appeared in hard-copy and online publications such as the Kansas City Star, the Sacramento Bee, the Seattle-Post Intelligencer, the Midwest Book Review, Rain Taxi, Radiant Attack, Innocence Denied, and others, much of which was syndicated by the Associated Press, Google News, and Yahoo News.
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