Beyond recidivism: identifying the liberatory possibilities of prison higher education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 2016, the Obama administration launched the Second Chance Pell Pilot Program, an Experimental Sites Initiative that provides funding to eligible people in state and federal prisons as they pursue undergraduate coursework during the period of their incarceration. The administration justified the restoration of education programs in prison in terms of recidivism rates, citing research demonstrating that educational attainment decreases the odds that a person is reincarcerated for new crimes or parole violations following their release. While recidivism is a desired outcome from the restoration of higher education in prison, it is not and should not be the only one. We argue that a focus limited to recidivism obscures the relationship between education and democracy and diminishes the radical possibilities of higher education for fostering peaceful and just communities. In this essay we highlight some of our experiences as faculty and administrators of Villanova University's undergraduate degree program at State Correctional Institution - Graterford to illustrate how the benefits of higher education can extend beyond market participation to include community building, expansion of social capital, and political action.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".