Recently, the Office for Career, Technical and Adult Education (OCTAE) at the U.S. Department of Education circulated a Dear Colleague Letter (DCL) advocating for strong investments in correctional education to promote safer communities and help reintegrate incarcerated individuals into the workforce through allocations of funds designated for CTE and adult education.
OCTAE’s DCL encourages States and localities to allocate more funding from the Adult Education and Family Literacy Act (AEFLA) and Perkins V to correctional education programs. It also urges a more comprehensive approach toward correctional education to yield greater employment opportunities for incarcerated individuals after they are released and reduced recidivism rates. A specific goal outlined in the letter is to enable more people to benefit from the newly expanded, Pell-eligible Prison Education Programs (PEPs).
Correctional education includes but is not limited to programming such as adult basic education, high school equivalencies and diplomas, postsecondary education, including CTE, and English language learning. About 1 in 3 incarcerated adults have less than a high school equivalence and only about 15 percent of incarcerated adults earn postsecondary degrees prior to or during their incarceration. However, research has shown that people who obtain their high school equivalencies while incarcerated increase their earnings by 24-29% the year after their release. Those who participate in postsecondary correctional education programs have a 48% lower risk of recidivating than those who don’t.
The DCL also addresses the workforce gap that can be filled with the hundreds of thousands of people being released from incarceration each year. It outlines how workforce opportunities created by the Biden Administration’s “Investing in America” agenda can benefit recently released individuals while fulfilling a need in our nation’s labor force, but only if these individuals are properly equipped with the educational background to take on the available roles.
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