30 January; presentations and (my) misleading information.

My apologies for some misleading information in discussion. I stated that it was illegal to devote federal funds to prison education in the USA. As I thought about that, I thought it sounded extreme even for as reactionary a penal system as the US, so I tried to check my sources (as of course one does). And I couldn't find my note, so I had to look again.

Funding for prison education has long been controversial. Private citizens often oppose prison education, because they assume that the government, and thus tax money, is solely responsible for finding prisoners' educations. Private charities and even inmates can fund prison education, however. Educational establishments also can help with funding...

"Governmental support of education for inmates and ex-inmates can be limited by law. In the United States, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 prohibited those convicted of felonies from receiving Pell grant assistance. The Federal Pell Grant Program offers less than 1 percent of its budget to the education of inmates. Other laws can, in fact, support the education of inmates. For example, the Higher Education Act’s Grants for Youthful Offenders program allows the U.S. government to spend $17 million US Dollars on inmate education, provided that inmates seeking to participate in educational programs are younger than 25 and have sentences that are less than five years in length.

From here--not a particularly good site itself, but compact enough to quote. If you are interested enough, here is the horse's mouth, as it were.

Many thanks to Rebecca, Becky and Lucy for the presentation--if you'll send me the link I'll post the Prezi. We did, as ever, get rather caught up in the practice of offender education itself, but it did raise some more general issues about inclusion which you might want to note for your submissions;

• The trade-off between the needs of the individual and those of the rest of the group. At what point does inclusion of one or two disturbed/disturbing individuals effectively exclude others?

• And the issue of targeting scarce resources--which is important but we did not actually get round to discussing in this context, although we have touched on it lightly, previously. There are two main strategies in this situation--and for managing all kinds of scarce resources, in health or aid or of course education in general;
• Direct resources to the place of greatest need. Which is many people's intuitive position, but can result in losing them down a bottomless pit.
• Direct resources to where they can do the most good, a strategy known as triage, which of course admits the possibility of "writing people off", but which ensures the greatest utilitarian return.