It Takes a Village: Post-Prison Community-Based Prevention and Intervention Planning

Abstract

Literacy holds strong at the core of social justice in the United States. People whose literacy skills are high, earn more, reside in safer neighborhoods, have access to health care, have few violent run-ins with law enforcement, and have a low representation in America’s state and federal prisons (Harlow 2003). President Obama wants a reasonable level of education for federal prison inmates, which the president sees as a college education (NYT, The Opinion Pages, 2.16.2016). Since we know that a majority of America’s prisons are illiterate or semi-literate with mental health disorders and addictions, the president’s goal has a seemingly endless set of problems. In order to educate convict felons, a majority of whom return to prison after their first release, state governments would have to dig deep in tax dollars in order to allocate funds to hire teachers, administrators, and modern instructional equipment. Seems doubtful, in the current crisis of rising costs of a four-year education for youth adults, that America taxpayers will offer dedicate more tax dollars to educate convicted criminals.

Keywords: recidivism, illiteracy, unemployment, crime