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Adult Correctional Education Improves Postrelease Outcomes

• Inmates who participate in correctional education programs had a 43 percent lower chance of recidivating than those who did not — a reduction in the risk of recidivating of 13 percentage points.
• Providing correctional education can be cost-effective when it comes to reducing recidivism.
• The odds of obtaining employment postrelease among inmates who participated in correctional education was 13 percent higher than for those who did not, but only one study had a high-quality research design.

Several Programs for Incarcerated Juveniles Show Promise

• Two juvenile correctional education programs show promise: Read 180 and Florida's Avon Park Youth Academy.
• The field is ripe for conducting larger-scale randomized trials.

Key Trends in the Current Correctional Education Landscape

• The 2008 recession led to an overall 6 percent decrease in states' correctional education budgets between fiscal years 2009 and 2012, but it had a much larger impact on states with large and medium prison populations (a 20 and 10 percent decrease, respectively).
• Most states reported using computers in correctional education, but student access to the Internet or Internet-based instruction was limited in most states.
• Of the states planning to implement the more rigorous 2014 General Education Development (GED) exam that relies on computer-based testing, there are concerns about teachers being adequately prepared to teach it and about the time it may take to prepare students for it, as well as about the negative effect on GED completion rates. Medium and large states are expected to encounter more challenges.