Inmates in City Jails To Earn Cash for Study

Inmates at city jails will soon join the list of New Yorkers eligible to earn cash for study.

The city's Department of Correction will begin this fall to pay prisoners to take classes toward earning a high school diploma, department officials told The New York Sun.

The program, which draws on $12 million in new funding to combat recidivism, was recommended by Mayor Bloomberg's Commission for Economic Opportunity, which helped devise a similar initiative to pay students for educational achievement.

Inmates who attend classes will be paid 27 cents an hour, officials said. They can earn about $5 a week, roughly the same rate paid for unskilled work.

City prisoners under the age of 18 are required to take high school classes. The new program will target those between 19 and 24 years old who might otherwise lack the motivation to go back to school.

"The pay will be minimal," the department's head spokesman, Stephen Morello, said. "But it will remove the disincentive that exists in the current practice of paying inmates for unskilled labor tasks in the jails but not for academic effort."

To qualify for the program, inmates will have to consistently attend and participate in classes, department officials said.

A fellow at the Manhattan Institute who opposes Mr. Bloomberg's cash incentive program, Heather Mac Donald, said that while it is dangerous to "bribe" people to learn, the program is worth trying in a prison setting.

Others see the program as a positive step. "The two most important things that correlate with rehabilitation are education and family contact," an expert on prisoners rights and a professor at Pace Law School, Michael Mushlin, said. "The thing about any confinement is that it's a moment of opportunity."