Content area
Full text
To meet the educational needs of America's undereducated population, educational scholars have attempted numerous strategies and interventions designed to facilitate learning and to improve achievement. A readily identifiable segment of the undereducated population is the nation's inmates, who have long been known to possess minimal literacy and other skills (Cookson and Carman, 1987; Tewksbury and Gennaro, 1994).
As early as 1931, Austin MacCormick suggested a systematic approach that prescribed separate diagnostic and treatment plans for all inmates so each received that which he or she required by way of academic and vocational enhancement. Although MacCormick is regarded as a visionary in correctional education and has received wide acclaim as author of a classical treatise on the subject, he certainly was not alone in his support for educational programs for inmates (Gehring, 1989; Muth and Gehring, 1985). MacCormick is one in a long succession of prison reformers since the advent and widespread use of a system of incarceration in the 17th century.
American prison systems particularly have been subject to expectations that correctional administrators provide inmates with educational and vocational training (Rothman, 1971). Zebulon Brockway (1912) recognized that the real function of prison is to help develop better citizens, not just better inmates or "institutional citizens" (Koski, 1998). Despite the collapse of the Kennedy-Johnson era "Great Society" reforms - accompanied by a politically accountable social-scientific empiricism in the late 1960s and early 1970s - advocacy of a prison-reform, rehabilitation-reintegration approach has never entirely abated (Beer, 1978; Beer, Greenstein, Heclo, Patterson, Shapiro, Ranney, Kirkpatrick, Brody, Epstein and King, 1978; Cohadas, 1983; Knapp and Polk, 1971; Komarovsky, 1975; Koski and Batchelder, 2002; Marion, 1994; Moynihan, 1969; Ohlin, 1993, 1975; Shapiro, 1978; Sundquist, 1968). According to Noad (1993), educational opportunities for inmates encourage human development, as well as help create more efficient, effective and functional people upon release.
Following nearly three decades of idled and stagnant scholarship, prison educators and those interested in the study of prisons have begun to demonstrate renewed vigor in envisioning and implementing ways to transform prisons that function in a practical sense as dungeons, factories and warehouses to those that operate much like schools and training facilities (Gehring, 1989). To accomplish this transformation, Noad (1993) suggested that programs should be constructed to meet...