Reducing Recidivism by Training Prisoners

The Wall Street Journal ran an article two days ago that brought back memories.  Prisons have decided the lack of programmers can be solved by moving prisoners into training programs that teach prisoners to code.  I can almost predict a lower recidivism when that happens, but having tried this before, we should know there is a better understanding of how to make money in other ways from programming. 

When we train people anywhere we assume these are a general population of people who are distributed somewhat equally across the social spectrum.  About 5% of them will be bad people who should be in jail, but the other 95% are generally OK following a bell-shaped curve of criminal behavior.  Prisons are not full of nice people, and do not contain a general population. 

Most people do not go to prison for a first offense.  They may not go to prison for a third offense.  But, once they get there we know they have committed more than one crime.  I went to the Corrections Institute at the University of Georgia many years ago when I was training for law enforcement.  We learned about people in jails that did not fit the standard perception of prisoners in rehabilitative institutions.  Some of the people in that community are habitual offenders and commit the largest share of crimes.  They are in jail because they got caught, not because they are not good at their jobs.  They have no desire to be rehabilitated.  They just want to get better at their job.  Teaching that group to program will move their crimes to an environment where catching them is much harder. 

We have had states experiment with prisoners processing credit card transactions for various companies and programming for mostly state government functions.  The bulk of the training takes place in California.  I really don't think this is a good idea, and we need some statistics to find out how that has worked out.  There were already crimes committed with credit cards in those prisons were they processing was taking place.  I wonder if any have been detected in programming functions.