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March 04, 2009
UT: Senate panel OKs prison-education overhaul. Sponsor says prisoners should pay bigger share of their behind-bars education
Senate panel OKs prison-education overhaul. Sponsor says prisoners should pay bigger share of their behind-bars education
By Steve Gehrke
The Salt Lake Tribune
Posted:03/03/2009
The state prisons are one step away from changing how inmates learn while locked up.
HB100 -- which aims to make prisoners pay for more of their own education through a loan system -- got a nod from a legislative committee Monday. It now heads to the Senate floor.
The measure met intense opposition from Sen. Brent Goodfellow, D-West Valley City.
Goodfellow helped establish the existing system. It takes nearly $1 million in prison-phone-generated fees and sends it to the Board of Regents. They then dole that cash out to the colleges that help inmates earn degrees.
Rep. Carl Wimmer, R-Herriman, wants to make prisoners repay about $1,500 within five years after their release. He also wants to keep phone-surcharge cash in the Department of Corrections, so its officials can run prison schooling as they see fit. They plan to focus more on vocational training and say that would better equip inmates to land jobs once they're released.
With a Monday amendment, the bill now would require the prisons to tell colleges what sort of class they wish to add and give the schools the first opportunity to teach it before looking elsewhere.
Salt Lake Community College officials had opposed the bill, saying they felt shut out of a program they had supported for years. But they now support the measure with the Monday change.
Goodfellow, who is also an SLCC administrator, assailed the bill and criticized Corrections for relying on education instead of using its own budget to aid prison schooling. Now, he said, Corrections wants to fix a program that isn't broken; a program he called "a model for the whole country."
He said prisoners and their families are already strained by the pricey phone surcharge. To require inmates to add a loan on to those fees, he said, is "unconscionable."
But Wimmer said the current system forces taxpayers -- potentially including victims of crimes -- to fund education for offenders. Meanwhile, law-abiding citizens are left to struggle to pay their pricey college tuition.
He said the move also would save Salt Lake Community and Snow colleges millions of dollars from their own budgets that they have used to subsidize prison schooling.
Sen. Karen Morgan, D-Cottonwood Heights, asked if forcing inmates to go into debt would deter them from taking classes, but Corrections Deputy Director Mike Haddon insisted there is already a long waiting list to get in -- thanks to the colleges cutting back the number of offered courses on the heels of budget cuts.
http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_11826588
Posted by lois at March 4, 2009 01:09 PM