To the editor:
We write from a Huge Ten jail training program, the place we’ve labored for a decade to extend entry to larger training for incarcerated people. We discovered the framing of the article “Jail Training Could Increase Threat of Reincarceration for Technical Violations” (Jan. 12, 2026) to be deceptive and have deep considerations for its potential influence on incarcerated college students and jail training programming.
The article fails to acknowledge many years of proof about the advantages of jail training. The title and framing deceptively suggest that faculty applications improve felony exercise postrelease at a nationwide scale. The Grinnell research—an unpublished working paper—is just knowledgeable by information collected in Iowa. Of most influence to incarcerated college students, the title and introductory paragraphs mislead the reader by implying that the blame for technical violations and reincarceration ought to be positioned on the justice-impacted people themselves. Buried within the article is a nuanced, correct, structural interpretation of the information: Per Iowa-based information, incarcerated people who pursue faculty could also be unfairly focused by parole boards and different decision-making our bodies within the corrections system, thus resulting in the next price of technical violations.
The influence of the article’s deceptive framing may very well be devastating for incarcerated faculty college students, particularly in a local weather the place legislators usually worth being “robust on crime.”
We perceive the significance for journalism to inform the complete story, and lots of the Grinnell research’s findings could also be helpful for understanding programmatic challenges; nevertheless, this explicit framing might result in its personal unintended penalties. The 1994 repeal of Pell funding collapsed jail training for practically 30 years; because of this, the U.S. went from having 772 jail ed applications to eight. Blaming incarcerated people for a structural failure might trigger faculties and universities to tug assist from their applications. We’ve already seen applications (e.g., Georgia State College) collapse with out institutional assist, leaving incarcerated college students with none entry to school. This materials menace is additional amplified by the article’s untimely conclusions a few discipline that has solely just lately—as of 2022 with the reintegration of Pell—begun to rebuild.
In a world the place incarcerated college students are denied their humanity each day, it’s our collective societal obligation to responsibly and pretty characterize details about humanizing programming. In any other case, we threat harming college students’ nonetheless rising—and nonetheless fragile—entry to larger training.
