For the last few decades, there has been a constant lively debate about the state of prisons. It is often argued that the criminals must be locked up and without enjoying privileges. However, the idea that prisons should offer education to inmates is more and more widespread for different reasons like reduction of crimes, saving money, solidarity. Imparting education to the criminals has been a topic of debate from past sometime. It has been argued that imparting the right education to the criminals can help a lot in changing their attitude towards the life and may help them get back on the right track. On the other hand those against the education for the criminals argue that prison is the punishment and is suppose to act as deterrent for those who commit crime, the term to be spent in jail is the punishment awarded to the criminal and should be spent as a punishment and not for something like education, otherwise it would be very easy to commit a crime and carry on with your normal studying activity inside the jail. There would be no fear of punishment left.

Different people have different views on this point. It is often thought that education to the criminals can really change their outlook towards their life. A recent survey has revealed that about 70% of repeat offenders are illiterate, and they are often caught in a cycle of crime. It is often believed that after release from jail or prison, still lacking the skills needed to survive in the workplace, they often end up returning to crime and incarceration. So it would not be wrong to say illiteracy is also linked to the crime rate of a particular region, state or country and it is possible to reduce crime rates by raising the education of potential criminals or the education level of people in general. Despite the enormous policy implications, little is known about the relationship between schooling and criminal behavior.

One argument against the main idea of providing education to criminals is that people in prison can dispose of an opportunity to be educated if people often commit crimes and these are quite serious, they deserve to be in prison. It is also believed that there are times when a lot of the criminals have been given opportunities and they are drifting into crime again and again even after the repeated efforts to educate them. The behavior towards the fact varies from person to person and few of them shows a positive response while few of them show no responsibility towards the education imparted. But the idea is that even if we are able to motivate 30% of criminals away from crime by the mode of education it would be a success.

Nevertheless, the experience of countries that have offered education to inmates in the past and are still continuing to offer education to criminals reveals us enough positive results to continue in this way.  A close observation on criminals reveals that the people who are locked up for one reason or the other can belong to different sections of the society but, mainly, they come from disadvantaged social groups and are often functionally illiterate. The punishment has already been applied so if the objective is to rehabilitate inmates and to prevent them for going back, governments should provide educational policies which improve their prospects for employment upon release and government should not consider spending funds on education for criminal as the wastage of money.

Crime and Illiteracy

Educating people before they become criminal offenders is definitely a better way of going about this, but maybe this is a deficit with the education people receive anyway. Some people learn about rights and wrongs and their decisions do not lead them to convictions but others with the same education differ. Education opens the doors of your mind towards a healthy and peaceful living. The figures of different surveys clearly demonstrate that there is a huge variation in crime rate among educated and the uneducated class. Educations give you a basic sense of the wrong and the right and you tend to differentiate clearly between the things that can lend you in a problem. Education molds us into a well-behaved citizen who is well aware of his rights as well as duties and is clearly in a position to judge things for himself. On the other hand, an uneducated person has no clear goals of his life and is also unaware of the fact that what is right and wrong on the social and moral front. Before committing a crime he does not think of the consequences.

Education provides us with an outlook and thinking, before committing any action an educated person tends to foresee the consequences of his actions on his family as well as his personal life. Educating people before they go to prison is a much better option, and so helping people stay in school and finish their education and then give them sound career advice is a way to stop people resorting to crime. The main reason that people resort to crime is the unemployment. There will be the minority of criminals who are master criminals and would still be criminals no matter what happened because they are good at it and make money from doing it. But most criminals will turn to crime because they have no other real choice, no job prospects they never excelled in school and so the only thing they can do is commit a crime. A better education for these criminals, career guidance at the right time and moral education at school could have helped these a right time. So it is also a fact that providing the right education at right time can also help reduce the crime rate.

Crime Reduction through Better Education
As discussed earlier, education is directly linked to the crime rate and good education can help a person live a happy peaceful life with harmony. Education can bring in a great change to the personality of a person as well as his attitude towards life. With better education comes a good career and along with that is the happiness. A person having a regular as well as a good source of income won’t ever think of committing any crime for money, also his job and studies keep him busy with his life that he is left out with no time to think about any anti-social activity. Lower educational attainment levels increase the likelihood that individuals, particularly males, will be involved in some kind of criminal activity and will get arrested or incarcerated. A study that looked at prisoners’ education levels in 1997 showed that male inmates were about twice as likely as their counterparts in the general population to not have completed high school or its equivalent, and four times as many males in the general population had attended some college or other postsecondary classes than those in prison which clearly defines the effect of education.

It is also a fact that the people who have high school diplomas or better, earn higher wages through legitimate work, thus reducing the individual’s perceived need to commit a crime or raising the potential cost of crime to that person to unacceptable levels. More time spent in the classroom may play a role in instilling values that are opposed to criminal actions. Spending the right time of your young age at school can help a lot in keeping away anti-social thoughts of committing a crime. Criminal behavior that begins during youth can continue into adulthood. By keeping adolescents in the classroom and off the streets, the later criminal activity may be avoided. It is the best idea to provide moral education as well as career guidance at the right time so that these young people do not move towards and criminal means.

Benefits of Education for Criminals in Prison

Education plays an important role in the life of every individual; education provides you with the reasons and purpose of your life and helps you to achieve your goals. Education provides individuals with the right direction towards leading a happy life. By educating prisoners we are in effect rehabilitating them so that they can return to society and play an active role in society. It is obviously cheaper to re-educate, than re-jail, and hope that with the education they receive they will get a job and pay tax, rather than re-offending and costing tax payer’s money. Education has a value in itself and it is important to develop the person as a whole, not just in terms of the qualifications they hold for employment. The breadth of the education curriculum is important and employability skills should not be emphasized to such an extent that the wider benefits of learning are excluded. Crime is a negative externality with enormous social costs. If education reduces crime, then schooling will have social benefits that are not taken into account by individuals. Given the large social costs of crime, even small reductions in crime associated with education may be economically important.

There are a number of reasons to believe that education will affect subsequent crime. First of all, schooling increases the returns to legitimate work, raising the opportunity costs of illicit behavior as well as reducing the time spent idle. Additionally, punishment for crime typically entails incarceration. By raising wage rates, schooling makes this `lost time' more costly. Second, education may directly affect the financial or psychic rewards from the crime itself. Finally, schooling may alter preferences in indirect ways, which may affect decisions to engage in crime.

A recent survey has shown that inmates who earned degrees whilst in prison tend to become law-abiding after their release significantly more often than inmates who did not pursue education whilst incarcerated. Education makes an individual more sensible and creates a broader outlook to differentiate between the right and wrong. Rehabilitation is possible, as well as more humane. Man seeks to exist and survive well with others naturally. The additives to him are accumulated as he goes through his life. The education program for criminals should be designed to restore self-respect and his willingness to live in trust and honesty with his fellow man and once you have rehabilitated him you have definitely eradicated criminality. It is really important to focus on man's abilities, his competence, his rightness and he wins and the additives fall away. Programs that restore self-respect have unparalleled success in reducing recidivism. That's the route to take. Anything else is simply a gesture.

Conclusion
The traditional punishment for those committing a crime is to put them in jail for a period of time with being deprived of many personal right and political right. Putting them in jail I aimed to punish them and they cannot do anything they want. Of course, that period of the time needs to depend on how serious the effect was brought the society by the criminal themselves. However, just put that in prisons does not mean that you can rebuild them radically, effectively and positively. It is important to deal with their crime. It is very important the cause of the crime which at most of the times is due to unsatisfied wants and unemployment or due to lack of education and lack of experience to judge right and wrong. If the idea is to really rehabilitate these criminals, then it is important to provide them with necessary education, teaching and moral values so that when they come out after completing their jail term these become transformed individuals who have gained command of their lives and have become educationally strong to get a job and spend the rest of their lives with respect and dignity.