Corrections Education

PRCLC’s program began at the Southern Ute Tribal Detention Center 10 years ago. In that time, it has become one of Colorado’s leading innovators in education behind bars.

Emphasizing academic basics as well as job readiness — from GED to college entry to vocational studies — the PRCLC Corrections Education Program believes that inmates possess a unique opportunity for life changes and community improvement.

Since jails and detention centers often lack the resources of state prisons or treatment facilities, the special conditions of SUDC allow customized learning and cultural advantages otherwise not available for offenders. Recent initiatives include classes in post-secondary preparation, creative writing, and workplace mathematics.

To learn more about the uniqueness of this work, please refer to our oft-requested 2007 CAEPA Conference presentation, "ReStructuring the Correctional Classroom."

Four Corners Corrections Education Forum, 2009

For Full Report on this event, please click here.

On November 20, 2009, the Pine River Community Learning Center with help from the CDE Office of Adult and Family Literacy hosted a gathering of education and justice professionals to discuss ways of transforming “criminal” behavior into “community” partnership. In its third year now, the Four Corners Corrections Education Forum (FCCEF) has grown from an afternoon meeting of regional GED teachers into a day-long networking event of corrections and probation officials, community activists, counselors, judges, social advocates, government administrators, and adult education professionals—all of them interested in trying to end the inflating cycle of recidivism, improve inmates’ rehabilitative options, and to work on resources for “making good” the changes that offenders and their families engage.

Although jails and detention sites are often the first places to deal with “problem people” in a community, they are also commonly the least able to intervene in ways that might bring about major reforms. In other systems too, inmates long habituated to the control mechanisms of institutions and public agencies may learn to endure but remain unused to taking initiative, opportunities, or social integration. Their existence in the outside world becomes more tenuous and evasive than productive or inspired—they can’t quite break free. As the Forum agreed, with climbing incarceration rates so too offenders increasingly “leave” only to “return”: confinement does confer an “education,” though not necessarily one that directs away from criminality and dysfunction.

In Forum workshops the participants examined the trends and obstacles for meaningful education options, but also the realistic needs and energies required to change conditions: for some, one key is to develop a means for early and sustained intervention, wherein the multiple forces of public agencies could be brought to bear; others felt that without sufficient follow-through or reentry support, released offenders could little expect to capitalize on gains achieved during lockup. Unanimous, however, was the feeling that only a mutual involvement of all authorities in the correctional, judicial, and public sectors—that only a combined and synchronous effort of expertise across the community –would yield the kind of change desired. Toward generating this support and further discussion, a volunteer panel was delegated to begin soliciting the various agencies and investigate possible venues which might lead toward a discrete project.

Representatives from La Plata, Archuleta, and Montezuma counties will confer biannually, prior to next year’s Forum (November 18, 2010), to set priorities, organize recruitment and input, and develop regional sharing. To see how you can get involved or for more information, please contact Scott Baker, Program Administrator, at (970) 563-0681.

contact us clic aqui kliknite