The Relationship Between Prison Education Programs and Misconduct

The purpose of this quantitative, pretest-posttest causal-comparative with control condition study was to examine if there was a difference in misconduct, as measured by reduction in occurrences of disciplinary infractions while incarcerated. General strain theory of criminal behavior provided the theoretical context for this study. The Arizona Department of Corrections’ Inmate Data Search Database provided data that represented male inmate prison education participation in the following programs: Functional Literacy, Work-Based Education, and General Education Development. Due to non-normal distribution, a Mann-Whitney U test was used to compare inmate disciplinary infractions (dependent variable) by participation versus nonparticipation in prison education (independent variable). There was a statistically significant difference in the change in disciplinary infractions between inmates who did and did not participate in prison education programs (U = 9,254, z = −2.62, p = .009). Based on a Kruskal-Wallis H test, there was not a statistically significant difference between the three program types in the reduction of occurrences of inmate disciplinary infractions (p = .062). However, when accounting for average differences in misconduct during the times of participation for each program, there was a statistically significant difference in adjusted misconduct difference scores (H(2) = 41.53, p < .001). Pairwise comparisons indicated that General Education Development had a greater reduction of misconduct than the Functional Literacy (p = .002) and Work-based Education (p < .001) programs. Results suggest prison education has an impact on the reduction in misconduct when compared to nonparticipation.