I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
At a time when a governor-appointed council is working to reduce the “revolving door” of offenders who wind up back behind bars, state prisons officials seem not to be wielding a key recidivism-reducing weapon: education.
Roughly a quarter of 111 jobs in the state prison system’s education bureau – 27 – are vacant, meaning up to a quarter of inmates might not be in classes because there aren’t enough teachers to conduct classes, says Gail Oliver, who last month retired as deputy corrections secretary for prisoner re-entry in the Department of Corrections.
“That’s huge. And it is going to get worse,” Oliver told the Independent.
The high vacancy rate seems to place a drag on the state’s efforts to reduce recidivism, a priority Gov. Bill Richardson has touted as part of his prison reform package leading into the 2010 legislative session.
And a department-wide hiring freeze that exempts only corrections officers and parole/probation officers means filling the positions isn’t a likely option, at least for now.
“It hinges on the budget situation,” corrections spokeswoman Rosie Sais said via e-mail Monday.
The prisons budget suffered a $12.5 million cut this budget year, and further cuts may be on the horizon. Richardson and top lawmakers are debating how to cover a mid-year shortfall of more than $400 million in the state budget, and one area of disagreement is how much to take from state agencies. Richardson has suggested 3 percent cuts, but some top lawmakers have said deeper cuts may be necessary.
Prison education programs are often cited as a major key to reducing recidivism, the rate of offenders who return to lockup within 36 months after their release. Some studies have concluded that participants in educational programs are 10 percent to 20 percent less prone to re-offend.
Meanwhile, a report issued last year by a task force appointed by Richardson emphasized the importance of education in reducing recidivism and urged the state to do more for offenders—even to the point of starting charter schools in prisons.
Currently, New Mexico’s 47 percent recidivism rate is lower than the national average of 52 percent, according to the New Mexico Sentencing Commission. But it was high enough for the Richardson administration to sound alarms.
But having so many job vacancies in the education bureau works against that, Oliver says.
“The unintended consequence is that we’re not going to be able to reach as many people as we were able to,” said Oliver, who until Aug. 17 headed up Richardson’s Re-Entry Council, a panel created to devise ways to reduce the number of offenders who wind up back in prison.
“Education is the Number One way of preventing people from going back to prison,” she added. “It really changes your outlook on life. You see a different point of view. You have a different perspective of people around you.”
Advocates and studies also point to evidence that suggests that education programs in correctional facilities increase literacy and that increased education generally results in increased income.
“Increased income is associated with a decreased incidence of crime,” write Audrey Bazos and and Jessica Hausman in a 2004 paper for the UCLA School of Public Policy and Social Research. “This can be explained because people choose between committing crimes and pursuing employment in the labor market. The risks associated with committing crimes are larger when having a job pays more, or getting a job is easier.”
By Oliver’s calculations, nearly 1,900 of the prison system’s 6,462 offenders might not be taking classes because of the high vacancy rate in the education bureau. She bases that on a 70:1 teacher-student ratio.
Last year’s task force noted at that time that 4,000 of the prison system’s inmates were using the system’s educational programs but that more than 1,300 eligible inmates couldn’t “access them at current staffing and funding levels.”
As it stands, few inmates could be classified as beneficiaries of a good education. According to the corrections department’s 2007 annual report, fewer than 20 of more than 6,000 inmates had some college while only half had a high school diploma. Meanwhile, the task force report noted that 32 percent of inmates tested at or below sixth-grade levels in reading and math; 10 percent scored at or below the third grade level.
