Special education in the most restrictive environment: Correctional/ special education

National attention recently has focused on the problems of delivering special education services to incarcerated youthful handicapped offenders. In this article, data from a national survey of state departments of correctional and special edu-cation relative to the need for, and provision of, these services are presented. Issues relative to the compliance of correctional education programs with the PL 94-142 mandate are discussed and recommendations for improving educational ex-periences for handicapped youths under the su-pervision of the criminal justice system are of-fered. Over 500,000 criminal offenders currently are housed in the nation’s 559 state and federal prisons and 3,493 local jails. Of this population, approximately 72,000 are incarcerated in juvenile ’ correctional facilities. In addition, almost 2 million persons are under community supervision instead of in confinement (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1983). This rate of incarceration, which is among the highest in the world, reflects a public and political attitude favoring increasingly punitive responses to crime, even though it runs counter to the philosophy of the least restrictive alternative. These statistics are alarming, but even more staggering is the revelation that a large portion of the incarcerated population are handicapped for educational pur-poses. For example, Morgan’s (1979) survey indicated that 42 % of incarcerated juveniles meet PL 94-142’s definitional criteria as handicapped. Surveys of adult correctional facilities in Oregon (Hurst & Heintz, 1979) and Louisiana (Klinger, Marshall, Price, & Ward, 1983) suggest similar proportions of handicapped in adult prisons, i.e., between 30 and 50 °~o. Correctional education, which consists of formal educational programs ranging from basic literacy training to postsecondary vocational and university education, ’Juvenile status is an arbitrary classification based on state statutes, severity of the crime, and the sophistication of the offender