Education & Incarceration

From the introduction:

“In this policy brief, we will focus more precisely on the question of who has been most affected by the growth of the corrections system, and illustrate how the impact of the decision to fund the prisons over schools has been concentrated among Americans with little education. The improved high school completion rates seen among minority men during the 1990s masked another reality: large segments of the African American community with little schooling were added to the nation’s prisons and jails. African American men have been so disproportionately affected by the growth of the prison system that serving time has become a common event for young African American men with little schooling. By fleshing out the relationship between low educational attainment and the increased lifetime risk of incarceration, this brief will provide another sense of the scale of the policy decision to invest in prisons over schools.”