One of my peers who I discussed this with stated his feelings about this topic with me: He said that he thought that criminals were in jail in order to be punished for their crimes and not to be given the great opportunity to be able to receive an education that a lot of his own friends can't even seem to access. While I do understand his point of you, I'm not in agreement. The ongoing argument about these programs also includes the question of funding and the amount of money and resources that are needed in order for the inmates to be able to have access to these programs.
According to a study in a 1997 article written by Harlow, roughly 41% of Federal and State inmates do NOT have a High School Diploma or its equivalent, the GED. In Vermont, any person under the age 23 are mandated to take classes through the Community High School of VT. It's been stated that 9 out of 10 State prisons and ALL of the Federal prisons do offer educational, vocational and/or rehabilitative programming. Basic education includes learning basic skills of reading, writing and math while secondary education programs actually prepare the inmate to take the GED test with 25% of those surveyed having accessed the secondary components. Additionally, vocational opportunities are present in 56% of the State Prisons and 94% of the Federal ones with around 30% using these programs to learn specific skills for specific jobs (Harlow, 2010). .
Numerous studies based on vocational programs, in different prisons have resulted in conflicting conclusions. This simply means that it's not clear one way or another that the programs really help to decrease the recidivism rate or not. In the Prison Education Research Project also known as PERP, the studies showed that those inmates who participated in programs offered while they were incarcerated had a lower rate of re-offending, saw better access to job opportunities upon their release, and resulted in .