Could education be the path to helping former prison inmates reintegrate successfully into society? Many politicians are saying yes, and one social entrepreneur has created an online program designed to help prisoners prepare for the job market.
Mike Feerick, an Irish social entrepreneur, is the founder of ALISON (Advance Learning Interactive Systems Online), a system of online courses that started up in 2007 and have since spread across the globe. ALISON launched a series of training courses for American inmates in early July, with an eye to help former inmates build better lives for themselves and avoid ending up back in prison.
Despite being the home of the free, as the national anthem would have it, a high percentage of the population is behind bars in the United States. A commonly cited statistic shows that, although America has less than 5 percent of the world’s population, it has an astonishing 25 percent of the world’s prison population. That means the percentage of persons in prison in the U.S. is the second highest in the world, surpassing countries such as Russia, Cuba and China. It is exceeded only by the Seychelles, a tiny nation of islands in the Indian Ocean, home to 90,000 souls.
In real numbers, there are about 2.2 million prisoners in the United States, with a disproportionately high number of African-American and Latinos locked up. Blacks are six times as likely to be in prison as Whites; and Latinos, twice as likely. The annual tab to keep them all imprisoned is $80 billion, close to the Department of Education’s budget.
Criminal justice reform would seem to be a necessity, and it has garnered support from leaders of all political persuasions. Criminal justice reform now has the overt backing of President Barack Obama, who made his stance on the matter clear last week. He has now commuted a total of 89 sentences of federal inmates convicted of non-violent drug crimes as of last Monday. He is the first sitting president to visit a federal prison, stopping by the El Reno prison in Oklahoma last Thursday.
Obama also laid out his vision for reform at the NAACP convention in Philadelphia on Tuesday. Obama’s priorities are easing mandatory minimum sentencing, overhauling solitary confinement practices, re-enfranchising felons, and providing job training for prisoners.
“While people in our prisons have made some mistakes, and sometimes big mistakes, they are also Americans and we have to make sure that, as they do their time, we are increasing the possibility that they can turn their lives around,” Obama said on Tuesday. “Justice and redemption go hand in hand.”
