In the blog article "Texas Spends Millions on College for Prison Inmates" the author stipulates that education funding for the incarcerated should instead go to the un-incarcerated under the premise of relative deservedness, but there are serious flaws to merits of such a policy, primarily this is because cutting higher education for the incarcerated costs more in the overall budget than not cutting higher education for the incarcerated.
This can be easily demonstrated by breaking down the costs of higher education and its effects on recidivism rates versus continuing cost of incarceration:
The most conservative estimate found for the cost per year of the average incarcerated prisoner, $22,000 per year.
The average recidivism rate for ex-prisoner is about 52%.
“Studies suggest that prisoners who participate in higher education demonstrate much lower recidivism than those that do not. For example, one longitudinal analysis of 3,000 ex-offenders found that those who participated in prison education programs were 29 percent less likely to return to prison (Steurer, Smith, & Tracy, 2001).”
Assuming that 29% of the 16,088 ex cons that haven't paid back $9.5 million would be back in prison without having participated in higher education, with the cost of 4665 inmates at $22,000 dollars a year, the incarceration costs alone would exceed the $9.5 million lost in unpaid loans in less than two months.
The Texas budget exists as complicated and interconnected piece of legislation. The effects of cuts need to analyzed within the larger framework to discern their overall effect. Providing higher education for Texas inmates comes at a surplus to the overall Texas budget, and should not be considered for budget cuts. For every dollar cut many from these programs, many more dollars must be spent baby-sitting the incarcerated, dollars wasted that could be spent benefiting society.
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