Prison Vocational Education and Policy in the United States

A Critical Perspective on Evidence-Based Reform

Andrew J Dick, William Rich, Tony Waters

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137564689
• eBook ISBN: 9781137564696
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Policy

This book explores California's prison system in the context of vocational education reform. For prisons in the early twenty-first century, ideologies of evidence-based management meant that reform efforts to change the purpose of prisons from punishment to rehabilitation through vocational education required "evidence" to justify policy prescriptions. Yet who determines what constitutes evidence? In political environments, solutions are typically pre-conceived, which means that the nature of the evidence collected is also preconceived. As a result, key assumptions about outcomes are often wished away to show improvement and be accountable. Through a detailed analysis interspersed with stories from the authors' experiences "behind the wall" among California's prison population, the authors challenge the nature of evidence-based research as used in the prison environment. In the process they describe the thorny problems facing reformers.

Section I
Section I

© The Author(s) 2016

Andrew J Dick, William Rich and Tony WatersPrison Vocational Education and Policy in the United States10.1057/978-1-137-56469-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Structure and Thesis of the Book

Andrew j. Dick¹ , William Rich¹ and Tony Waters^{2, 3}

(1)

California State University, Chico, CA, USA

(2)

Payap University, Chiangmai, Thailand

(3)

California State University, Chico, California, USA

End Abstract

Thesis

This book reflects a favorite teaching strategy Bill learned from reading Richard Elmore (2011). At the end of a course, Bill likes to ask students to respond to the following prompt, “I used to think … and now I think ….” This kind of reflection becomes even more interesting when students reframe their current understanding of problems and issues to see events and actions through multiple frames of reference. In this situation, we, as authors and researchers, are also in the role of our students whose task is to answer “I used to think … and now I think ….”

The thesis of this book is that evidence-based research in prison includes two contradictions. The first contradiction is that the goals of prison and education are fundamentally different and even contradictory—prison is about punishment and discomfort while education is about nurturance and learning. This thesis is developed in Chap. 1. The second contradiction is the nature of agency-funded “evidence-based research.” Such research conflicts with the implicit and explicit policy goals of the agency funding the research (in this case the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation [CDCR]). Policy goals are always generated in a political environment that reflects values and not rationally generated “evidence.” This is dealt with in Chap. 2.

This book elaborates on why these two contradictions exist and the consequences for not only our study of vocational education in California prisons but policy-focused research in general. Or, to quote ourselves from Chap. 6:

Such a rational program should in theory work; after all, its assumptions are rooted in the best research available and sound understandings of how and why criminogenic factors contribute to crime rates. However, such a rational model also assumes an efficient and effective bureaucracy to administer what is, after all, a complex process of individual diagnosis, delivery of programs, and parole follow-up. As will become apparent from the data presented in this report, the CDCR is not always able to deliver such programs at least for vocational training, particularly in the context of what the overcrowding in California’s prisons that the Three-Judge Court Panel (2009) explicitly described as “criminogenic.”

It is clear from what the Expert Panel (2007) and others write, that programs can and should be developed for prisoners that reduce rates of recidivism for parolees. Among these programs are the programs specified in AB 900. What is less clear is whether such complex programs can be implemented in the current environment of California’s overcrowded prisons.

Overall Organization of the Book

Our book is structured to allow readers to see our subject as research, critique, and personal human experience. Given what we learned and experienced, we believe there is really no better way to address the combined subjects of prison education, prison reform, bureaucracies, and the nature of evidence-based research than to layer the original report between our analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of evidence-based research.

We kept the original structure of the report because we believe it is useful for policymakers in California (and elsewhere) who assess prison vocational education curricula. However, we adjusted subtitles and some language so the subject is less “California centric.” We believe that the problems of doing research about vocational education in prison are not unique to California but are present in many prison systems in the USA. This part of the book is for anyone interested in what it means to safely implement effective vocational education classes in prison when faced with gang activity, frequent lockdowns, and other stringent rules of a security-conscious environment. The bulk of this part of this book was written and conceived under the leadership of Andy Dick in 2010–2011. We learned much about this subject during our study and want to share it with a broader audience.

This book is structured in a unique way. Including the report itself, there are four elements: a preface and introductory chapters, the report, vignettes, and a concluding chapter:

1. 1.
   Prefatory remarks that place the study of vocational education into the context of larger bureaucracies for prison administration and schools and an introduction to the report. This includes the Preface and Chaps. 1–3. These sections were prepared by William Rich and Tony Waters in 2013–2015.
2. 2.
   A revised and expanded version of the report (the “deliverable”) produced under contract to the CDCR in 2011 (and which was declined by the CDCR in favor of a shorter, more administrator-friendly version) is the “middle part” of this book. To make the original report accessible, we have broadened the language in a way that places vocational education in California in the context of the massive institution, that is, the CDCR, which includes over 100,000 inmates, 65,000 staff, and a budget of $10 billion per year.

   The report is divided into six chapters (Chaps. 5, 6, 9, 10, 13, and 15); Chap. 10 is by far the longest and includes the data that is the basis for our analysis and conclusions throughout the book.
3. 3.
   Tucked between the report chapters are eight provocative, jolting, and surreal vignettes describing how prison life dominates the delivery of otherwise conventional vocational education courses (Chaps. 4, 7, 8, 11, 12, 14, 16, and 17). These are stories of alcoholic “pruno” and greenhouses, strings dangling from anuses, the culture of retirement, missing glasses, life sentences, and why things could be worse. These stories highlight how prison bureaucracy pushes and pulls at innovations in prison education within the massive system of incarceration found in California today. These stories come from what we experienced and were written based on our notes, and were written by William Rich and Tony Waters.
4. 4.
   A final chapter (Chap. 18) describes the broader lessons learned about vocational education in prisons, the implementation of public policy in California, and the difficulties of doing academic research—applied or theoretical—in the context of California’s prisons. This was written in 2014–2015 by William Rich and Tony Waters.

The Book in Three Sections

Section 1 (Chaps. 1–3)

In the first section, we introduce ourselves and set the stage for our project by giving our bona fides as applied practitioner-researchers. We explain how we landed a research contract with one of the largest prison systems in the world, the CDCR. The task we contracted for was to evaluate the effectiveness of 12 vocational education programs spread across 8 institutions in 24 classrooms. The CDCR wanted to know if the classes begun in 2007 would lower CDCR’s 3-year 66 % recidivism rate by 2010.

In Chap. 1, we describe the politics behind this contract and of the major reform law passed by California’s Legislature and signed by Governor Schwarzenegger in 2007 (AB 900). This is also discussed in a more general way in the Literature Review of the report itself (Chap. 6).

We visited prison classrooms funded by AB 900 multiple times over a 3-year period and produced research reports of which we are very proud. But we were also stymied by the fact that our official reports do not tell the whole story of vocational education in prison. Telling this story more in-depth is the point of Chaps. 2 and 3. We conclude these two chapters by describing the Kafkaesque nature of studying such a question in the immense bureaucracy, that is, the CDCR prison system. In doing this, we critique the implicit theories that govern the system and its contracting for research with people like us. Layers of complexity were added as we address what was perhaps the most important issue of all: resolving the paradoxes between prison security, punishment, and the nurturing environment of the classroom.

In our study, there were always “elephants in the room” that remained unaddressed; specifically, the courses we studied were not in schools but in a “custody world.” The schools we studied were, in fact, prisons. The nature of such “undiscussables” (Argyris & Schoen, 1996) in a prison environment is that they are wished away: classrooms were framed as free-standing units magically parachuted from the state Legislature into prison yards with an assumption that they were somehow free of the prison environment. We show how linear logic models, rational and reasonable though they may be, do not work when they rely on simply renaming existing processes and groups, as if renaming them alone will magically change the historical trajectory of an institution. This section represents a critique of efforts at the current trend in management, evidence-based decision-making.

This, of course, returns us to our thesis, which focuses on the limitations of both doing “education” in an institution focused on punishment and the inherent conflicts of interest for doing research in a politicized policy environment.

Section 2 (Chaps. 4–17)

The Report

The second section of this book has two parts, interspersed. It includes an edited version of the main report we submitted to the CDCR. This report is the anodyne original report, in its full evidence-based glory, as submitted to the CDCR on December 31, 2010, by Andy Dick and ourselves. It was rejected by the CDCR in February 2011 because it was too long and detailed. We were told by the analyst rejecting the report that CDCR executives could not read anything more than 60 pages, including an Executive Summary. The rejection was copied to CDCR legal counsel and payments to the CSU Chico Foundation withheld pending the submission of the 60-page report.

We used to think that comprehensiveness and evidence were the main points of the project, but now we think the CDCR’s reaction is actually an object for the study itself. As applied researchers, we were, and still are, proud of the original report we submitted on December 31, 2010. It used original techniques to satisfy the CDCR’s demand for “evidence-based” research and numbers to try to answer the question of whether the classes we observed reduced recidivism, which was the overriding question the California Legislature and the CDCR were so concerned about. We did this despite the fact that, for example, there were only imprecise “proxy” data for rearrest: the CDCR could not provide us with data indicating whether or not inmate students enrolled in the classes we observed were rearrested in the 3-year period after release. Nor could they tell us if the inmate students were employed in the trade they learned in prison or anywhere else.

We used to think that these omissions were technical problems to be overcome with statistical manipulations, but now we believe the absence of the data is a big part of the story itself. These omissions were the product of (at least) two things. First, we did not have a 3-year window to follow prisoners who completed the courses. Simple math made the Legislature’s recidivism goal impossible to achieve. The courses began in 2007 and we received the data in October 2010. These 3 years did not provide enough time for inmates to complete classes, leave prison, and then be tracked to see if they committed new crimes within 3 years of release.

The second part of this omission was less straightforward. Oddly, the CDCR does not link databases for prisoners and parolees. They do this in order to protect privacy and discourage “fraternization” between prisoners on the inside and those on parole. The results are two separate bureaucracies within the CDCR that do not talk to each other verbally or via the nonexistent Internet links in prisons (no Internet connections were permitted in classrooms because of security concerns). No CDCR teacher on the “inside” was permitted to initiate communication with a parole agent or prisoner released on parole. Consequently, a basic source of data was missing. There was no way to find out from the CDCR’s computers if a specific parolee who had taken a vocational education class had recidivated or not. Initially, we thought we would get the data, but we now know the data never existed. The absence of such basic data is not something to be gamed statistically; it is part of the story of why we used to think one thing but now think another.

Officially, the CDCR refused to accept our report because it was too long for their administrators to read (296 single-spaced pages) and, therefore, it is out of compliance with the specifications of the contract that asked for a “brief” report we were told it should be about 60 pages.

The length of our report had grown not only because of our own interest but mostly because of the extraordinarily rich qualitative interview data we collected and reported. Such data are nuanced, “thick,” and much bulkier than a numbers-driven report. Our pride and enthusiasm were reflected in the report, which we wanted to share with CDCR administrators and teachers whom we respect and believe are perfectly capable of digesting a longer report. So why did they reject the report?

We believe the rejection may have been based on our recommendations, particularly, promoting school principals (powerless middle managers) to the rank of Assistant Wardens in order to increase the authority of education in the prisons. We suspect this, because a year after our revised, shorter final report was submitted in June 2011, the Assistant Superintendent of the Office of Correctional Education had not received the report or even knew of its existence. Apparently, not all evidence was appropriate for the educators to read even in an institution where decision-making is based on evidence.

Still, our report did answer the very specific research questions posed by the CDCR administrators, and it analyzed the quantitative data that were provided while developing the deeper analysis based on qualitative interview and field observations. While the content is not bland, the report chapters are the perspective of emotionless, unbiased, rational data-driven researchers, which was the persona we assumed.

Vignettes

We also recognized we would have personal, human reactions to what sociologist George Ritzer (1998) calls the bureaucratic “rationality of the irrationality,” or did we see something even worse, the inhumanity in the humanity? So we added personal vignettes between the report chapters. These stories were written from jarring or shocking experiences that, while not accounted for in our research methods, most certainly add validity and depth to the knowledge we developed. These vignettes describe our personal experiences as researchers with the underlying prison culture. All are part of the context needed to understand vocational education in prison.

Section 3 (Chap. 18)

The third section of the book is contained in Chap. 18, which is a summary critique of the limitations of evidence-based decision-making in prison education. We “close the loop” by asking how our report met the goals—or not—of evidence-based research. It is here also that we return to the thesis about the contradiction between the nurturing environment of schools, the punitive nature of prisons, and the inherent limitations of doing policy-oriented research in prison. We point out that these contradictions inherently corrupt the process of research itself. Such contracting implicitly restricts the evidence we can collect because the conclusions we reach need to focus on what the contractors want, rather than what they need. But we do not conclude our...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Section I
• 2. The Report & Vignettes
• 3. Section III
• Backmatter