Eye On America | Angelou School an example for reforming offenders

Ross Weingarten Columnist

The students at Maya Angelou Charter School in Washington, D.C. are just like any other high school students in the country. They go to class, play sports, work part-time jobs to make extra spending money, and socialize with their friends. Many of them hope to graduate and go off to college.

However, the students at the Angelou School are also a world apart from your average teenagers. Almost every student at the school has been in trouble with the law. The mission of the Angelou School is to take promising youths from juvenile detention centers and prisons and give them the opportunity to go to school. It’s not open to everyone, there is a formal interview process—but if a young man or woman shows a willingness to learn and be disciplined, they are often given a shot.

The workload is great, as students have packed class schedules. After school, students head to the basement to work at the in-house catering company. Most students are required to work there for at least a few hours a week, preparing meals and sometimes helping to serve them at banquets or fundraisers in Washington, D.C. Students are also involved in extracurricular activities; there is a basketball team and the school has put on drama productions in the past.

While many feel that it is only juveniles that deserve this type of hands-on, interactive rehabilitation, establishing schools like the Angelou School for adults would greatly reduce the number of prisoners in confinement around the country. The United States incarcerates more individuals than any other country in the world. Our prisons are literally overflowing. The Justice Department reported in 2002 that the nation’s prison population topped 2, 000, 000 for the first time, meaning that one in every 142 U.S. residents is now incarcerated.

Prison reform should rank high on society’s list of things that must be changed. We are spending millions of dollars on prisons to accommodate the growing number of inmates, yet when many of them are released, they commit more crimes and return shortly.

Why not take a page out of the juvenile system’s book? We should provide more education outlets for our prisoners. We should fund prison libraries instead of buying more prison beds. Additionally, if we were to require that prisoners do community service like they do at the Angelou School, we could make them improve the communities that they wronged with their crimes.

The Maya Angelou Public Charter School and other schools like it are a new way to look at the rehabilitation of prisoners. For years, when a person under 21 committed a crime, he or she was thrown into a juvenile hall, which is a prison for minors. There they would wait until their 21st birthdays, when they would be released back into the world. Few attempts, if any, were made to teach these children right from wrong. As you can imagine, the rates of juvenile delinquents returning to prison were extremely high.

Officials are slowly learning that rehabilitation, not just incarceration, is the answer to the increasing number of released offenders committing crimes. In Vermont, prisoners are transported from correctional facilities to take classes at Community High School. At the 17 Community High School locations in the state, there are about 3,500 inmates taking classes. Many of them have committed atrocious crimes, yet they are given a second chance through education rather than mere imprisonment.

Students at both the Maya Angelou School and Community High School are thankful for the opportunity presented to them by their unique institutions. Ashleigh Allard, a 20-year-old woman in the middle of her sentence for domestic assault, said in an interview, “Even though I’m not glad to be incarcerated, I’m glad I got the chance to get my high school diploma because I know if I had been outside prison, I never would have been able to do so” (cnn.com). School officials and students at schools for juvenile delinquents believe that prisoners will be much less likely to commit another crime once their sentences are completed and they leave these schools.

Measures must be taken to improve the lives of prisoners behind bars and to not only confine our incarcerated population in prisons, but to give them an opportunity to see the errors of their ways and learn how to contribute positively to society. If this is put into action, recidivism rates will undoubtedly plunge, and eventually the number of prisoners will decrease.

Don’t think it will work? Take a look inside a classroom at the Maya Angelou School, and then think again.