Importance of Reading Books in Prison

Importance of Reading Books in Prison

Last year, I was contacted by a young man in prison and he would soon be ending his term and payment back to society. He may be out now, I am uncertain. During our various email conversations through their prison screening system and mentor advisor I learned he was interested in starting his own business once he got his freedom back. He contacted me because before I retired I ran a mobile auto cleaning business - he wanted to know the ends and outs. His prison system had a library, vocational training, and an entrepreneurial program.

Get this, those who went through the entrepreneurial program had a recidivism rate of fewer than 5%, and that just blows away most all the numbers of any program in any country ever created for those in prison. How is this possible, and what was this prison doing that others had not? Well, it seems they were engaged with those inside, and there were outside mentorship groups willing to take these folks under their wings. It also turns out that those who spent the most time in the prison library were also under 10% recidivism rate.

Now then, the other day our think tank was looking into this issue and conveniently at the same time the RAND Corp published a great research paper titled; "How Effective Is Correctional Education, and Where Do We Go from Here? - The Results of a Comprehensive Evaluation" by Lois M Davis, Jennifer L Steele, Robert Bozick, Malcolm Williams, Susan Turner, Jeremy NV Miles, Jessica Saunders, and Paul S Steinberg. You can get this paper and read it yourself at no cost:

http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR564.html

Folks incarcerated have a lot of time on their hands, time without much to do, lots of hours - that time shouldn't be wasted. There is time to read, study, and learn, time to think and to read. Many folks who didn't get a proper education because they dropped out, joined a gang and got into trouble now have a chance to reboot their lives.

Imagine being taken out of society for 10-years, imagine the last ten years - social media didn't hardly exist back then - how about 20-years? Think about it, the Internet was barely coming into fruition for the average citizen. There were not many options, a haphazard categorized search engine, AOL, and not a lot was going on, most people didn't have email back then. Twenty-five years ago, hardly anyone had a cellphone, people mostly used pagers. Today, there are more cellphones per person in prison than the city you lived in back then.

Getting a diploma, staying informed, learning history, math, science, English, or planning a new business can certainly put parolees in a much better place for success as they reintegrate into society. This is good for them, and good for all of us. It saves taxpayer's money, cuts down on crime and provides a much better chance for success. Please think on this.

Lance Winslow has launched a new provocative series of eBooks on the Future of Education. Lance Winslow is a retired Founder of a Nationwide Franchise Chain, and now runs the Online Think Tank; http://www.worldthinktank.net.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/expert/Lance_Winslow/5306

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_(By Lance Winslow).