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Record W3158394080 · doi:10.18192/jpp.v17i1.5265

Higher Education in Prison: The Palo Verde Model

2008· article· en· W3158394080 on OpenAlexvenueno aff
Eugene Alexander Dey

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of Prisoners on Prisons · 2008
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicCriminal Justice and Corrections Analysis
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPALOPrisonPolitical scienceHumanitiesSociologyCriminologyArtComputer science

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

F or decades, in an example of social responsibility, college and prison administrators worked closely together towards a common goalhigher education.When Congress established Pell Grants in 1965 as part of a national movement to increase civil liberties, prisoners directly benefited from the funding mechanism (Taylor, 1992).By the early 1980s, roughly 350 colleges and universities used Pell grants to fund a myriad of post-secondary correctional education programs (PSCE) (ibid).Research compiled over 20 years showed recidivism rates dropped from 70 percent to 20 percent for those who received at least an Associates degree (Taylor, 2004).The results were greater for those who earned a Bachelors degree and even more impressive for prisoners who received a Graduate degree (Taylor, 1992).However, in the tough on crime 1990s, the ideology of extreme punishment, mind bending warehousing and untreated addiction would replace common sense so to win the war on drugs and the war on crime, and dispose of those unable to cure themselves.Under this heavy-handed model, the Congress in 1994 excluded prisoners from the Pell Grant program (Dey, 1994, p. 18).Without this financial lifeline, by the end of the '90s only a handful of PSCE programs survived (Dey, 2005a), returning us to the penological Dark Ages of the pre-Civil Rights era.Due to America's fixation on crime and punishment, the national prison population swelled to 2.3 million prisoners by the mid-2000s and beyond (The Sacramento Bee, 2008, E6).Above the influx of state dollars pouring into the local economies, prisons built in rural locations created some unforeseen opportunities for prison-dependent communities (Dey, 2005a).Colleges in remote outposts of the prison-industrial complex are frequently in jeopardy of losing their accreditation and funding because of problems maintaining full-time enrolments (FTE) (ibid).This correctional-educational manifestation is common in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), the largest prison system in the country with 33 institutions and roughly 170,000 prisoners (Beyer, 2008, p. 1).Seeing an opportunity where no other existed, Palo Verde Community College, located in the sparsely populated desert region of southern California, became determined to take advantage of the untapped resources at Ironwood State Prison (ISP) (Dey, 2005b, p. 9).Beginning in 2000, with courses offered entirely through correspondence, Palo Verde 33 graduated 30 ISP student-prisoners in 2003 with Associates degrees (ibid).With hundreds enrolled, ISP now has a class regularly graduating from Palo Verde College (ibid).Educators at Lassen Community College (LCC) took notice and decided to follow Palo Verde's lead.Nestled in the mountains of northern California, Lassen County is the home of two state prisons, the California Correctional Center (CCC) and High Desert State Prison (HDSP), plus a brand new federal prison in nearby Herlong.With three prisons, Lassen County is one of the largest penal colonies in the world, dubbed Prison Town, USA (Galloway and Kutchins, 2007) in a documentary.This is the perfect location for a community college to begin teaching in a correctional environment (Dey, 2005a).Lassen College, on the brink of failure as an institution of higher learning, decided to apply the Palo Verde Model of PSCE administered through correspondence.Beginning with 60 prisoners in CCC and HDSP in the spring 2005 semester (Dey, 2005a), the fall 2006 semester would realize LCC's first class of graduates who would receive Associates degrees in Liberal Arts.Like Palo Verde's, LCC's program has thrived.At the beginning of the summer 2006 semester almost 200 students were in CCC and HDSP, plus around 50 in Herlong.This is a win-win for all involved.Lassen College receives much needed FTEs and the prisoners, primarily from impoverished backgrounds, receive an education free of charge.The CDCR now has a growing number of fully funded Associates degree programs.Above the Palo Verde Model of correspondence, Patton University in Oakland has been teaching at San Quentin in Marin County since 1996 in a privately funded program that also offers Associates degrees (Dey, 2005).This is a far cry from the 350 Associates and Bachelors programs prior to 1994, but PSCE is beginning to make a comeback on a much smaller scale. PoWeRfuL testiMonyHow higher education transforms a convict into a scholar occurs in increments.As the college curriculum soaks in over a number of semesters, the prisoner morphs.A lifetime of using their cognitive skills primarily to promote another agenda, providing higher education to them while in prison gives them a chance to use their intellect in a legitimate manner.Getting a suspect to answer questions are the tools of law enforcement.As a matter of protocol, if not survival, prisoners are disinclined to cooperate with inquisitors.But a prisoner participating in PSCE at CCC is 34

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.004
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.081
Threshold uncertainty score0.000

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.004
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.001
Bibliometrics0.0020.001
Science and technology studies0.0080.012
Scholarly communication0.0110.008
Open science0.0020.006
Research integrity0.0040.005
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0280.002

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.

Opus teacher head0.044
GPT teacher head0.343
Teacher spread0.299 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations1
Published2008
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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