I believe they already do get free education.
My grandfather was training inmates to be electricians at Southern Michigan state prison 30 years ago.
I can’t afford a degree on my own...just break the law and get room & board and a degree...not a bad idea. Let the Producers set me up for life!! My kids could do it, too!!
It depends. I think education is a good idea, since most people in jail are not in for major crimes or even for violent crimes. What should be in jail in their stead are all the union teachers, educational union bureaucrats, and politicians who permitted and encouraged the teachers and bureaucrats to conduct a public educational system where a large percentage of the graduates in certain parts of the country were functionally illiterate, and others graduated with absolutely no job skills and unable to do things like math or even arithmetic, which would have enabled them to learn skills on the job. Plus the schools were so lax that they had no work or behavioral ethics. De Blasio just gave a raise to these teachers...in a perfect world, he’d be in jail now.
Prison does give us a captive audience and a chance to catch up on this. Put in trades schools (even get the crafts unions involved) and basic ed and maybe things will improve. I actually have met people who have come out of prison (depending on the part of the country) with a skill or at least the basic knowledge to get into a program on the “outside” and have taken advantage of it.
Some criminals should be put to death immediately because they are vicious; others should be locked away forever for the same reason; others will be in for many years but even if they were learning and doing something in jail, could make the environment less violent and less conducive to more crime; and others will be out in a few years and it would be beneficial to everybody if they could drop the aimless, unstructured life that got them into criminal activities and get a job with real people in the real world.
Many of them (the “preferred minorities”) are already offered free college BEFORE they go to prison; they just couldn’t be bothered.