The Effects of College in Prison and Policy Implications

ABSTRACT:

Despite the policy relevance of college-in-prison, the existing research on these programs has important flaws, failing to address selection and self-selection bias. We address an important policy question: what are the effects of college-in-prison program? To do this, we provide the largest study published to-date of a single college-in-prison program. We analyze the effects of the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) in New York, a liberal arts program that has offered college courses to incarcerated students since 2001. By leveraging the BPI admissions process, we employ a design-based approach to infer the causal effect of participation in BPI. We find a large and significant reduction in recidivism rates. This reduction is consistent across racial groupings. Moreover, people with higher levels of participation recidivate at even lower rates. In light of these findings, we provide policy recommendations that support college-in-prison programs.

Keywords:

• Higher education
• college in prison
• recidivism
• criminal justice

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank Michele Staley, Brian Lane, and Sarah Peterson of the New York Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (NYDOCCS) for their help assembling the NYDOCCS data. Additionally, we thank Andrew Papachristos and Jacob Hacker through the Yale Policy Lab. We thank Adam Thal for leadership and collaboration throughout this project. We thank Fredrik Sävje, Gwen Prowse, the Yale ISPS Policy Fellows, and the anonymous reviewers for their feedback on drafts of this paper. We thank Hersh Gupta for feedback and research assistance. We thank Zelda Roland of the Yale Prison Education Initiative for helping establish the Yale-BPI partnership. Finally, we express a deep appreciation to BPI’s Max Kenner, Megan Callaghan, Daniel Karpowitz, Jed Tucker, Jessica Neptune, and Hannah Henry for their incredible support and numerous insights about college-in-prison.

Disclosure Statement

We would like to disclose that one author is employed by the Bard Prison Initiative as Research Director and a Site Director for one of the facilities. We disclose that this represents a conflict of interest. We have taken steps to ensure this does not compromise the scientific integrity of this research. All data analysis has been conducted by the author who has no affiliation with BPI. We can provide all necessary documentation and code to verify our analysis.

Notes

1 They utilized the Maryland Scientific Methods Scale to categorize the studies, and they included only those with a rating of 2 or above. From there, they narrowed it down to those that fit into category 3 (including some basic controls), category 4 (including more a more robust control group), and category 5 (using random assignment).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Matthew G.T. Denney

Matthew G.T. Denney is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Yale University. His research focues on themes of race, criminal justice, and faith.

Robert Tynes

Robert Tynes, Ph.D., is director of research and site director for the Bard Prison Initiative. His research focuses on human rights issues, including child soldiers, African politics, foreign and domestic terrorism, online activism, and college-in-prison.