When presented with the question of how education is connected to crime and crime rates, one’s natural assumption is often to assume that the more a person is educated, the less chance that he or she will commit a crime. It’s one of those things that seems to be common sense. After all, the conventional reasoning goes, the more education one has, the better job and more money he’ll make and therefore won’t need to commit a crime. That’s why it’s perplexing when one learns that much of the research indicates more education of more people is not directly related to less crime. However, that statement is not clear-cut either, because there are also studies that show education may indeed be related to less crime, although the effect is indirect. So the body of evidence may best be characterized as mixed.
Over the last couple of decades, however, researchers have learned to better delineate their hypotheses and reduce variables in their studies to give some indication of why the results are mixed and how educational content might be adjusted to encourage less crime. An examination of the research over time and in various settings will shed some light on this issue.
Four Illustrative Studies
Throughout the last century, most research on the outcomes of education focused on individual earning power and its benefits to whole economies. In 1998 Nevzer Stacey decided to undertake a comprehensive literature review to examine the social benefits of education, that is the impact of education on areas important to society, including crime. Her idea was to supply decision makers with information that could be used in developing national education policies. When Stacey (n.p.) looked at the impact of education on crime rates, she found that “the empirical evidence regarding the effects of education on crime is limited.” Many models for understanding criminal behavior did not even consider education as a variable and those that did tended to use time-based models of analysis that viewed education as a substitute activity for crime. (These models viewed work the same way.) Stacey also found that in the late 1980s and early 1990s, socioeconomic variables began to be considered in research assessing the linkages between crime and education. Some studies were conducted with adolescents, where teens believed to be at-risk for criminal activity were tracked over time and various interventions measured in terms of their preventive potential. Among these interventions were various educational programs and job training. Ultimately, Stacey drew the conclusion that the social benefits of education were frequently discussed, but seldom measured reliably, and that “[a] serious problem is the difficulty of capturing the external effects of education” (n.p.).
A few years earlier, in 1992, Stephen Duguid was involved in studying the relationship between education and crime at the source—with incarcerated offenders whom he was teaching in his role as the director of the Prison Education Program at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia. During his time working with prisoners, Duguid learned something very important: It wasn’t education itself that helped deter criminal behavior; it was the type of education that did.
Rather than teaching skills designed to help prisoners get jobs upon their release, Duguid learned it was more effective to teach the same subjects that were taught in regular, high school curricula. He de-emphasized his students’ status as prisoners and emphasized their humanity—their status as individuals who had the agency to make choices to be something, rather than merely to do something. By reinforcing his students’ self-esteem and sense of accomplishment, he found that education could sometimes change their attitudes about life and work. This had a direct bearing on the students’ success once they were released from prison.
It turns out that ex-offenders don’t have difficulty getting jobs so much as keeping them. Their main problems at work tend to be the inability to get along with bosses and co-workers, not problems understanding or doing the work assigned. It seemed to Duguid that his students had a weak understanding of their responsibilities as members of society, and if he could help them develop this faculty, along with empathy for others, they were less likely to end up back in prison for committing another crime shortly after they got out. Further, he found that “establishment of a bond to the conventional world is the central factor in [their] success” (n.p.) He came to envision his teaching role as helping change attitudes, not develop skills.
The most recent study of the four highlighted here took place in 2013 and was reported by the Alliance for Excellent Education, an advocacy group located in Washington, D.C. The report, called Saving future, saving dollars: The impact of education on crime reduction and earnings, claims that “lower levels of educational attainment” are linked with “higher rates of arrest and incarceration” (n.p.).
Furthermore, the report presents specific education benefits in terms of hard numbers and dollars and cents. For example, if the male high school graduation rate in the US were increased by 5 percent, the incidents of assault would decrease by almost 60,000 and larceny by more than 37,000. Violent crimes would be prevented also, including nearly 1,300 murders and 3,800 rapes. This seems a far cry from the mixed results found by earlier researchers and one wonders about the calculations and assumptions that underlie the process used to determine these impressive statistics. The Alliance’s report is an aggregation of research from many sources, so it is probable that the group had to come up with some formula to standardize the data to make it comparable across time and disciplines. In any case, the point the group wishes to make is clear: more funding for education translates into a safer social landscape.
According to the Alliance, the US spends an average of $12,643 to educate one student for one year and an average of $28,323 to house one inmate for one year. Even allowing for a substantial margin of error in those figures, it is still obvious that an investment in education yields a far greater return than one in corrections. This is not news; anyone who chooses to be informed can find out via a quick internet search that it’s cheaper to educate than to incarcerate. Yet we continue to build more prisons and feed more money into a system that by all accounts is soul-sapping and dismal ,at best.
It is not a coincidence that the majority of prison inmates today are black and brown men whose education took place in the worst public schools in the country. What if we invested in those schools at the same level we invest in prisons today?
References
Alliance for Excellent Education (2013). Saving futures, saving dollars: The impact of education on crime reduction and earnings. Retrieved from: http://www.all4ed.org/high-school- soup/
Duguid, S. (1992). "Becoming interested in other things" The impact of education in prison. Journal of Correctional Education, 43(1) p38-44. Retrieved from: http://www.jstor.org/ stable/41971904
Lochner, L. and Moretti, E. (2003). The effect of education on crime: evidence from prison inmates, arrests, and self-reports. Department of Economics, UCLA. Retrieved from: http://www.econ.ucla.edu/moretti/papers.html.
Stacey, Nevzer. (1998). Social benefits of education. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 559. p54. Retrieved from:
http://ann.sagepub.com.libproxy.newschool.edu/
