MUNCIE— Around the same time state and federal funding was being cut for college education in Indiana’s prisons, the Indiana Department of Correction and Ball State University began publishing research demonstrating the importance of correctional education.
“As formal-education attainment goes up, the recidivism rate (the percentage of ex-prisoners who are re-arrested) goes down,” said John Nally, director of education at IDOC. “They’re in lockstep. Correctional education translates into safer communities, less people committing new crimes and less probation and parole violators coming back into the correctional system.”
Nally joined BSU criminal justice professor Taiping Ho and other researchers in conducting a study of 6,561 offenders who were released from IDOC in 2005. The offenders were counted as recidivist offenders if they were returned to the custody of IDOC during the study period (2005-09).
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