INVESTIGATING THE INSTITUTIONAL AND EXTRA-INSTITUTIONAL FACTORS THAT CONTRIBUTE TO SUCCESSFUL PRISON EDUCATION PROGRAMMING

During a national survey on prison education in 2011, the Institute for Higher Education Policy released a list of thirteen states that they deemed “high-enrollment states” (IHEP, 2011) as a result of their comparatively high levels of enrollment in prison education programs, making up 86% of all prison education enrollment in the United States. Along with increased enrollment, this set of thirteen states also accounted for 93% of all bachelor’s degrees and 94.3% of all associate degrees despite making up less than half of the prison population (IHEP, 2011). This thesis searched for a number of institutional and extra-institutional characteristics that could potentially correlate with these high-enrollment states ranging from “cost per adult in custody” to “prisons per university.” Through an analysis of these statistical characteristics and how they correlate to high-enrollment states, there was shown to be a strong positive correlation between prison population and high-enrollment states as well as juvenile incarceration and high-enrollment states. With this information in mind, I conducted a further analysis into three high-enrollment states and the ways that each of their prison education programs operate, respectively, to see if anything could potentially be informative from a policymaking standpoint