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• Community Colleges and Workforce Training in the Criminal Justice System

Transcript

Tim Sablik: My guests today are Stephanie Norris and Matt Wells. Stephanie is a senior research analyst and the associate director of the Community College Initiative at the Richmond Fed, and Matt is a senior economic writer, also at the Richmond Fed. Thank you both for joining me.

Stephanie Norris: Thanks for having us.

Matthew Wells: Great to be here. Thanks a lot.

Sablik: We're going to be talking about a recent article that Matt wrote for Econ Focus, which you also helped with, Stephanie. Listeners can find that on our website, richmondfed.org. The piece examines community college workforce training programs for prisoners and former prisoners.

To start, Stephanie, how do these programs fit into the mission of community colleges?

Norris: Community colleges are well positioned to take on this kind of work. They are designed to serve the individuals, institutions, and employers in their local communities.

Community colleges are tasked with providing educational opportunities to students from all walks of life, and ensuring the training that they receive really prepares them for the workforce or for further post-secondary education. This means that instructors are familiar with learners from a broad range of ages and backgrounds.

The majority of people who are incarcerated at correctional facilities will be released and expected to re-enter society. So, setting them up for success is in the communities', and thus the community colleges', best interests.

Sablik: Matt, can you tell us how prevalent these types of programs are at community colleges?

Wells: This is a little bit dated, but a report from the Vera Institute of Justice — which is one of the nonprofit organizations that tracks prisoner education and prisoner rights and those sorts of things, prison reform — noted in 2017 that 28 states out of 50 had college education programs while in prison.

More recently, in 2020, the Justice Center of the Council of State Governments issued a report that only 17 states had a full range of post-secondary education programs that were aligned with the local labor market. A lot of communities are trying to wrap their heads around how can we get this population back into the workforce.

Here in Virginia, this past month, the legislature passed a bill that would expand the presence of community colleges throughout the state prison system so that there would be more opportunities for more inmates who are looking to turn things around to get in the classroom [and] get some training to get ready for when they're released.

Sablik: Yeah, so definitely some growing interest in these types of programs.

How did you learn about these programs and how does understanding them fit into the Fed's mission?

Norris: We learned about these organically as we visited community colleges in the [Fifth] District, particularly community colleges in the more rural parts of our footprint.

Because of the Fed's focus on maximum employment, we are inherently interested in the barriers people face when trying to enter the labor market or re-enter employment after an absence. Sometimes there are skill-related barriers that make it difficult to find employment, but oftentimes people face challenges that are not skill related at all, things like the lack of childcare or transportation. In some cases, having a criminal conviction significantly impedes a person's ability to find employment.

Folks who have been incarcerated often face both skill- and non-skill-related barriers, making this a population of interest for us. Folks who have been incarcerated for a long time may not have had access to education and skill building opportunities, so there's some loss there. Once they are released, they have to navigate the job market with a criminal record. We've seen community colleges design programs to help with both sets of these barriers.

At the Richmond Fed, we're particularly interested in rural communities. We tend to see lower employment-to-population ratios in these non-metro areas. So, understanding how to improve those numbers and how to ensure that people have access to the labor market and that the workforce is thriving is an interest area for us.

Since correctional facilities are often located in rural areas, there's a real opportunity for rural community colleges to lean into that anchor role. Community colleges, especially in rural areas, are well connected to local employers and understand the skills that are in high demand. This positions them well to design programs for incarcerated folks that will equip them for job-ready skills that can be used right away upon release.

Sablik: Now you get a break. [Laughs]

Matt, one of the programs you highlight in your piece is Campus Within Walls, which is run by Southside Virginia Community College in Emporia, Va. The program operates within five correctional facilities throughout the state. Can you talk about how the program works?

Wells: Sure. Stephanie can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Emporia is also a fairly rural area of Virginia.

What they do in Southside is they offer two different associate's degrees in general studies and in business management. Also, in keeping with the idea of being connected to the labor market needs of their communities, they have developed pretty substantial operations in trades and those sorts of things. In particular, they have an HVAC program, a solar panel installation and maintenance program, and an electrical program.

Now you might think to yourself, how do you get trained on those sorts of things while you're in prison? The Campus Within Walls folks have worked really closely with the Virginia Department of Corrections [to] develop a mobile unit, almost like a mobile shed, that has all three of those different components on it: electrical wiring, a heat pump, and solar panels. They are holding training sessions on these things.

You might wonder who these instructors are. Sometimes it's word of mouth, sometimes it's the local employers who are doing some of the teaching.

I think one of the things that we learned through speaking with these folks is the close coordination that is required to bring this equipment into these facilities. That's a heavy lift for everybody involved, but so far it's working out.

Sablik: In addition to these types of programs, like the one run by Southside within correctional facilities, there are also some schools that run workforce training programs for recently released individuals. Can you share some examples of those?

Wells: Craven Community College [in New Bern, N.C.] has what is called the Craven-Pamlico Re-entry Council.

For a lot of folks who are incarcerated, when they're getting ready to leave, they're given a re-entry packet, which has explanations of different sorts of benefits they're entitled to [and] simple things that many of us take for granted like how to use a cell phone, how to get access to a cell phone, how to get access to a bank account, how to register to vote — all these different things that could be useful to them. But, in a lot of respects, that's pretty overwhelming.

What we heard from a lot of these programs is that folks who are getting ready to get out are supposed to be assigned a re-entry coordinator. But a lot of times funding is short, so a lot of these folks will come out without having known about what the different opportunities for placement are. They rely on, to some extent, the parole officer to put them in touch with a lot of these re-entry councils.

Craven-Pamlico developed sort of a model boot camp, a two-week boot camp for folks. If you read the article, we spoke with a gentleman named Darrin Casper who went through this program. He felt it really set him up for success for when he got out.

Sablik: You mentioned some of this already in talking about the Campus Within Walls program, but what are some of the unique challenges that community colleges face when running these types of programs?

Wells: On the classroom level, security is an issue and it varies from facility to facility. Wardens will have different standards about what equipment they'll let into their facility. If something happens in another part of a prison, there might be a total shutdown of the whole facility, meaning classes can't happen.

We also learned that as students get closer to their release date, they tend to be moved around more, closer back to their homes. But if they're already enrolled in the class, then there's no guarantee that they'd be able to continue to stay in that class. And so that's a challenge.

Study space is another challenge, working with wardens to set up spaces for students to not just have the classroom but also be able to study, to have access to the books and things that they need.

The final one is a large one, and that's internet [service], not just for during the class, but also for getting their funding. Everybody who signs up to go to post-secondary education generally will fill out a FAFSA form, which is the Federal Application for Student Aid. That form, nowadays, is done online and you can get your funding package back within a matter of days. But inside the prisons, there's not consistent access to the internet, and so they do it via paper a lot of times. That can take six to eight weeks.

Norris: On top of that, we've written and talked about before the structural challenges community colleges face already in terms of tight budgets due to a variety of factors, including funding formulas and them being open access admission institutions. The high cost of the equipment for some of these technical programs that Matt talked about is the target programs for education in prisons.

Sablik: Given all these challenges and hurdles, what motivates these community colleges to continue these programs?

Norris: Community colleges are nimble. They are committed to this. We've seen very creative and innovative ways to make the funding work and make the logistics work, but it is not easy.

I think elevating the challenges can be difficult. Through writing things like this, we can sort of highlight where the pain points are and where the successes are. Now that these models are more prevalent, colleges are learning from each other. They can find out best practices and they can see sort of what works. But connecting the colleges to each other can be hard, too. That's why really giving them the opportunity to tell their stories is important.

Sablik: That's the perfect segue to my next question which I was going to ask. In having these conversations with community colleges and researching for this piece, did you get any sense of the success of these programs?

Wells: We asked folks who we spoke with about success rates. For the programs that are within the facilities, it's hard to keep track. Once they are out of prison, they're under no obligation to report anything or connect with the college that they were with, unless they decide to continue their enrollment on the campus as a regular student.

But, on a wider level, there's plenty of evidence that recidivism rates decrease as inmates are able to participate in educational programs while they're incarcerated or after. The Vera Institute of Justice found that, in a 2023 report, recidivism rates could be reduced by as much as 66 percent. Not only is that a good thing for society, but it also cuts down on the costs of running prisons. In an earlier report, they estimated that, nationwide, states could save over $365 million annually by having these programs.

Sablik: Stephanie, [when] it comes to the Richmond Fed's Community College Initiative, do you have plans to study this topic further?

Norris: Yes. Topics like this are important to our understanding of who's missing from the labor market, who struggles to remain in the labor market or re-enter the labor market. That's tied in very well with our dual mandate.

A lot of work that we do on community colleges also centers around the fact that we just don't have great data on outcomes for a lot of the students, so we are targeting that in a few different ways. Matt highlighted the research that's been done to show the broader impact to society. Combined with the need to understand individual student outcomes and workforce barriers, there's a lot more that we could dig into on this topic.

Sablik: Stephanie and Matt, thank you so much for joining me today.