Online Learning Becomes Court-Ordered Community Service

An anonymous reader writes "Yahoo Finance reports that convicted criminal offenders can serve their court-ordered community service hours online by taking educational courses through Community Service Help. According to the article, there is a high correlation between criminal activity and lack of education. Who knew? 'About 40 percent of all U.S. prison inmates never finished high school, and nearly 44 percent of jail inmates did not complete high school. More current data shows that hasn't changed. In Washington, D.C., for instance, 44 percent of Department of Corrections inmates are not high school graduates. Less than 2 percent had 16 years or more of schooling.'"

Comments

Once again

[Dunbal]

Correlation != cause. Educating them will just mean smarter criminals. Not everyone can work in banking.

Re:Once again

[bipbop]

Yes, only the smart criminals can work in banking!

Re:Once again

[JoshuaZ]

You raise, a good point. The evidence suggests that to some extent criminals lack of education is caused by other variables that lead to both to criminality and make completing school more difficult. In particular, criminals have on average lower intelligence, http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/201006/why-criminals-are-less-intelligent-non-criminals poor impulse control,http://neuro.psychiatryonline.org/article.aspx?articleID=101809 and extremely high self-esteem ,http://www.emotionalcompetency.com/papers/baumeistersmartboden1996%5B1%5D.pdf, all of which are associated with doing poorly in school.

However, there's also evidence that some amount of criminal behavior is due to lower education reducing work opportunities. The most successful programs at reducing recidivism are those which educate the convicts. https://www.stcloudstate.edu/continuingstudies/distance/documents/CollegeEducationandRecidivismEducatingCriminalsisMeritorious1997.pdf although the exact causes of this are unclear http://www.bop.gov/news/research_projects/published_reports/recidivism/orepredprg.pdf. So, while there is a correlation v. causation issue, it does look like education genuinely helps.

Re:Once again

[Kjella]

But very few can work in unskilled labor, those jobs are practically going away not to mention when the going gets tough you're in competition with all the skilled labor too. I remember there was an article here in Norway about a position as warehouse assistant, they got 3-400 applicants and the job market here isn't even tough. If it had been I'm guessing 1000+ applicants because it's the kind of job absolutely everyone can do. But there's a very limited number of McJobs and even most of those want people that have worked retail before plus domain experience like working with food. You don't need qualifications to stand on the street corner and sell drugs or break windows and steal shit. Of course some would continue to be criminals, but I think a lot of them did because they failed at everything else.

Of course this is just highly anecdotal, but at least on my school I'd say there was a group of losers that compensated by being badass. Drinking, smoking, talking tough and following through if necessary, breaking the rules - if they couldn't be successful at school they'd make their own kind of success. They were attractive to the kind of girls that like "bad boys" too, that was important in that age. Particularly since those that were neither badass nor did well weren't treated very nice. But once that becomes the defining order, it escalates. You're not drinking beers to be badass, you're drinking liquor. Or you're doing drugs. You're not breaking school rules, you're shoplifting. And as everyone else's opinion of you deteriorates - other school mates, parents etc. your standing in the gang only becomes more important.

I'm not talking about street gangs in New York here, I'm talking about a fairly quiet suburb in low crime Norway. I'm thinking this is a pattern that exists more or less all over the world, of course it doesn't explain all crime but I think it explains a lot of petty crime, the kind people say came from "hanging with a bad crowd". And yes, I'd say failing at school is a leading cause as to why people start doing that. I'm not so sure it'll help though, most of these people were failing for a reason and they're not going to be the brightest even if they get remedial education. But maybe it can give them some sense of achievement on the other scale, they might not win any Nobel prizes but they're making a honest living. It's at least a chance to getting out of a bad circle if they're willing to take it.

Teaching the curve not the median

[awilden]

Of course there are many reasons that people don't finish school. Sometimes it's because they're not smart enough. Other times it's because they're bored out of their skulls, or family issues are pulling them away, or a million other reasons. Maybe this should be interpreted as yet another reason that we need to revamp schools so that they do more than just deliver a "one-size-fits-all" education to the middle of the bell curve. Education is expensive, but prison is far more expensive.

Re:Teaching the curve not the median

[TheRaven64]

Customising isn't that hard, if done at the correct granularity. My school split the year group into about smaller classes for each subject. Most of these were streamed based on ability so if you were, for example, gifted at mathematics but not at French then you'd be in a class learning mathematics faster but a slower French class. This used to be common in the UK, before the governments of the '70s and '80s decided that judging people based on their ability was elitist and therefore bad.

Re:Teaching the curve not the median

[TheRaven64]

Are we sure prison is more expensive? I see it as slave labour.

Slaves are expensive. It costs something like $40k/year to incarcerate someone. If they're working the equivalent of a minimum wage job at the same time, then it's not really a good investment.

Re:Teaching the curve not the median

[bipbop]

But the costs are externalized. A lot of people are making money off the new slave labor.

Re:Teaching the curve not the median

[ShanghaiBill]

Privatizing prisons is insane, it creates an incentive for throwing more people in jail..

Those incentives exist with or without private prisons. Plenty of people profit from government run prisons. For instance, here in California, the prison guard unions spend huge amounts of money promoting tougher sentencing. This includes donations to politicians that vote for tougher laws, and financing the "Three Strikes" voter initiative. We have prisoners serving 25 years for stealing a pair of socks.

Repeated

[Anonymous Coward]

33% of statistics are simply repeated. Of cited statistics 67% are not repeated. More recently 33% of statistics were repeated.

In other news...

[jouassou]

"...give me all yo' money, or I'll bust yo' ass like Atahualpa at Cajamarca!"

Re:Uhh...

[TheRaven64]

A lot of criminals commit crimes because they don't believe that they have any options. You put them in prison and they come out and still can't get a job (especially now that they have a record), so what do they do? Commit more crimes. Give them some useful skills, and they see that they do have a choice.

A small minority are just naturally and incurably sociopathic. Most of these work in management...

Re:Go to jail

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting that if you actually look at the site (Community Service Help), for a criminal to get involved in this "non-profit" organization, they need a credit card number and a Pay Pal account.

The whole Community Service Help Website reads like a sleazy advertisement. Note the picture of the smiling, big breasted girl showing her cleavage right on the front page of this "charity".

This whole business appears to be a Slash-vertisement. Couldn't Slashdot reference an academic journal instead of some sleaveball Website that seeks to profit off of vulnerable people?

References:
http://www.communityservicehelp.com/

Re:Go to jail

[hairyfeet]

Sadly profiting off of misery is a time honored tradition here in America, hell i wouldn't be surprised if over 75% of the "community service" forced upon people by the state didn't involve kickbacks or bribes. Its just slave labor, getting for free what one normally would have to pay for. Hell look at that judge that was sending kids to boot camp for any old reason he could think of because he was getting a kickback. in case you haven't noticed our courts have become just as corrupt as any banana republic, just sit in on some sessions and be prepared to be horrified. I have watched the rich walk away from some insanely long list of charges because his very expensive lawyer "had a quiet talk with the judge in the back" while some poor Rube with a $20 bag of weed got a year in prison. The only justice is what you can buy, no different than any South American hellhole we USED to make fun of. But power corrupts and money is power so now you have two systems, one for the rich, one for the poor.

Re:WTF

[swillden]

Also, kids that get in a lot of legal trouble tend not to be able to finish a high school diploma. Juvenile detention centers do teach classes, but the credits end up being so fragmented as kids jump between detention and regular school that it's difficult for them to actually fulfill the requirements -- and that assumes they don't just fail their classes anyway.

I have personal experience with this. My daughter is very bright and capable, but suffers from a severe emotional disorder which leads her to make a lot of dumb decisions. Even though she typically does very well in school, her time in treatment centers, trouble with the law, expulsions from schools, etc., mean that she's chronically behind on credits. For example, she completed much of the first semester of Calculus this year (as a junior), but then got in trouble and ended up getting no math credit at all. She's now in a residential treatment center and taking dum-dum math because it's all they offer, but won't get any credit for it because she's already done it.

In her case, because she's so bright, the solution will likely be to take the GED as soon as the state will let her, and she'll pass it handily. Or else I'll pay for summer school classes, or something similar. She's smart enough, and has involved parents, so she has a chance to be able to make it. Kids with similar issues but without similar advantages are really screwed. Of course, if she can't learn to manage her mental illness -- which is very, very hard to do -- she's going to be screwed, too. We try to help every way we can, but we can't live her life for her, and as she becomes an adult the consequences of bad decisions are going to become even more severe.