Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Yes, only the smart criminals can work in banking!
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.
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...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
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/