Whoever said there are no second acts in American lives cannot have heard of one federal program that deserves congratulation instead of condemnation. For, yes, there are such programs, and they don't benefit just those who are paid outrageous salaries to administer them with your tax money, Mr./Mrs./Ms. Arkansas. Let's face it: Nobody seems to benefit more from federal anti-poverty programs than those who administer them, and yet there are happy exceptions to that dismal rule.
Exceptions like the Second Chance Pell program that gives the eligible, deserving, and newly aware a decent chance not just to survive but thrive. Because they've finally figured out the best three ways out of the trap they've got themselves into: education, education and education.
These prisoners already have demonstrated their growing worth to the rest of us by getting their high school diplomas or its equivalent in GED degrees. They're all eligible for release in the coming years and could use the money from the federal government for a fresh start instead of just retracing the steps that led them to a life of crime.
Arkansas has one of the fastest-proliferating prison populations in a country full of other examples of too many people incarcerated, too few genuinely reformed. So why not put our own tax money where our mouths are when we proclaim that redemption is always possible?
Here's a program that dispatches professors or teachers' assistants to the prisons. Inside, inmates can use the prison library to check out textbooks and other volumes that broaden their minds and leave them better citizens instead of the kind that endanger the rest of us. Talk about a sound investment, it's worth a AAA rating. Classes are usually convened after the day's work schedule has been met, which means respecting the old Puritans' work ethic instead of discarding it as outdated Calvinist theology.
Arkansas State University at Newport has been working for decades with the McPherson unit of the women's prison system and with the men's Grimes Unit prison nearby. This is scarcely an experimental program, but it was endangered when the funds to finance it evaporated. ASU-Newport has stepped in to provide scholarships, but the money to pay for them has grown scarce of late.
Allen Mooneyhan, a dean at ASU-Newport, has been reduced to sounding an alarm instead of celebrating how much the school is doing in the prisons: "We just have known that we can't keep scholar-shipping forever. I suspect we've used 10 times more scholarships for inmates the past three or four years than we have the decade before. We just know that we can't continue that."
At last count, the school now has 55 students at the Grimes and McPherson units with another eight already on scholarships. And the more that number grows, the better news it will make.
To quote Jerome Green, the president of Shorter College in Little Rock, "The Arkansas Department of Corrections . . . . what their research shows is that for every year of college that a post-incarcerated person has, recidivism goes down about 20 percent, so that by the time they reach the master's level, the recidivism rate of persons who have been incarcerated that go back [behind bars] reaches zero. That's a statistic that we found to be very eye-opening."
It may be forgotten that when a prisoner is punished, so are a lot others: innocent wives and husbands, mothers and fathers, and all the other family and friends of the imprisoned who might as well be imprisoned themselves, waiting and waiting for release.
When society jails just one person, it turns out, the bars of his cell clang shut for many others. Isn't it time we gave all of them a second chance?
Editorial on 10/22/2016