A few days ago I made the argument that although college access for inmates was getting a lot of attention today, a higher priority for new federal spending should be making the many dysfunctional prisons in America humane, safe, and have expanded programming for all. 1/
Many people got my point. Some didn’t. Some criticisms were civil. Some weren’t. So going to restate the argument more clearly. 2/
My 1 regret is some people read the tweets as being critical of existing prison college programs. That was not the intent. In fact I said when prisons meet basic standards of humanity they should add college. They help people. Those who run & work at these programs are saints. 3/
I can say A should be a higher priority than B without making an absolute judgement on B. And that's what I did. My argument is I believe the next dollar of federal spending has higher value helping to make all prisons functional and humane for all inmates. 4/
First, many advocates for expanded college access recite claims from studies that college access more than pays for itself through better jobs and lower recidivism when inmates are released. If true, we should definitely expand college access. 5/
We should expand any program with positive outcomes & pays for itself in long run. But an objective reading of the literature doesn’t show this. The research doesn’t show it’s a money loser. It doesnt show anything bc all the studies are not of a rigor that can make any claims 6/
So I started the argument by cleaning the slate about what we know about the long term budget ramifications of college access, which is almost nothing. 7/
But, VERY importantly, just because something costs money or doesn't have an RCT doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it. There may be benefits that aren’t measured or measurable and there may be a moral obligation to do it. So here’s where the argument gets tricky. 8/
I’m not saying society does or does not have a moral obligation to provide a college education to those during incarceration. Reasonable minds can disagree on what the moral obligation is for society to any of its members, free or imprisoned. 9/
I do believe (1) budgets, even federal, are not unlimited and therefore must be prioritized & (2) there are even higher moral obligations to inmates than college access, including a right to safety, humane living conditions, and (at least) basic physical & mental healthcare. 10/
There are too many prisons that aren't meeting these most basic needs of survival. 11/ 
A repeated critique of my argument is that federal Pell grant & state prison funding are separate streams & not interchangeable. It's true that today almost all operational funding for state prisons is local. But I’m talking about how new fed $ could be spent in the future. 12/
There are lots of examples of fed $ being used to fund traditional state activities to incentive different behavior or supplement funding, both permanently like Medicaid expansion and K-12 Title 1 and transitional funding like Race to the Top and Prison Rape Elimination Act. 13/
My argument is that the new fed $ that would go into Pell Grants could also be used for other things within state prisons. We have a crisis in many state prisons today and the fed govt has the tools, both sticks and carrots, that can help make prisons more humane. 14/
Not only do I think one's physiological and safety needs are a higher priority than the need for college, I think in many cases they are a precondition. Some prisons are so dysfunctional that it's hard to imagine success by adding college access to the current environment. 15/
An analogy is I went to a meeting at one of the lowest performing elementary schools in Houston. The state was threatening closure. The principal announced that her plan to fix the K-5 school was to make it an aeronautical engineering magnet. True story. 16/
And I’m like, "Whoa. I think you’re missing steps 1-10 that are a necessary precondition before you start teaching engineering to 4th graders who are now at a 2nd grade math level." Did some students at that school have the potential to do a.e. work? Probably. 17/
Was that the best thing for the principal to focus on to turnaround the school? I don’t think so. Can some inmates at Parchman Penitentiary succeed in linear algebra? Probably. Is the highest priority at Parchman college access? I don’t think so. They need steps 1-10 first. 18/
One commenter said “it’s not like members of Congress are debating between Pell Grants and prison locks.” That’s exactly right and that's the problem. Policy makers aren't talking about steps 1-10. 19/
I worry the Pell grant debate is sucking the oxygen out of the room & distracting away from the real crisis, which is that many prisons in America are inhumane, immoral, and criminogenic at the most basic level. 20/
My anger with "College Behind Bars" is it implies there's an easy solution to the prison crisis: college access. The crisis in American prisons is so much deeper and structural. If resources were infinite then let’s do it all. But they’re not. Not even at the federal level. 21/
The point of these tweets is we shouldn’t lose sight of the forest for the trees. There’s a story almost every day of the horrors that are happening in the American prison system. Fixing those is priority #1. 22/
But those aren’t getting talked about much at the national level for lots of reasons. The funding source is less clean. The problem is hard. But I really worry that those who want to make the system better are also getting distracted bc Pell grants is deemed easier to pass. 23/
Costs aside, are Pell grants better than no Pell grants? Of course. Are Pell grants better than having a prison system that is more rehabilitative and less criminogenic? I don’t think so. And in a world of limited resources, I think we should prioritize the latter. 24/
But members of Congress aren’t proposing legislation that will improve the living conditions and humanity in places like Parchman Penitentiary. And that's the problem. That’s the documentary that needs to get made. 25/25
Postscript: The original tweet thread was misinterpreted by enough people that I removed it for the sake of clarity. The above is my original argument written more clearly.
