"Are Schools in Prison Worth It? The Effects of and Economic Returns to Prison Education"

The title of this post is the title of this paper available via SSRN and authored by Steven Sprick Schuster and Ben Stickle. Here is its abstract:

We estimate the effects of various forms of prison education on recidivism, post-release employment, and post-release wages.  Using a sample of 148 estimates drawn from 78 papers, we conduct a meta-analyses to estimate the effect of four forms of prison education (adult basic education, secondary, vocational, and college).  We find that prison education leads to decreases in recidivism and increases in post-release employment and wages.  The largest effects are experienced by prisoners who participated in vocational or college education programs. 

We also calculate the economic returns on educational investment for both prisons and prisoners.  We find that each form of education yields large, positive returns, due primarily to the high costs of incarceration, and therefore high benefits to crime avoidance.  The returns vary across education types, with vocational education featuring the highest return to each dollar spent ($3.10) and college seeing the highest positive impact for each student participating ($16,863).