Prison Vocational Education and Policy in the United States: A Critical Perspective on Evidence-Based Reform

This book explores CaliforniaÆs prison system in the context of vocational education reform. For prisons in the early twenty-first century, ideologies of evidence-based management meant that reform efforts to change the purpose of prisons from punishment to rehabilitation through vocational education required ôevidenceö to justify policy prescriptions. Yet who determines what constitutes evidence? In political environments, solutions are typically pre-conceived, which means that the nature of the evidence collected is also preconceived. As a result, key assumptions about outcomes are often wished away to show improvement and be accountable. Through a detailed analysis interspersed with stories from the authorsÆ experiences ôbehind the wallö among CaliforniaÆs prison population, the authors challenge the nature of evidence-based research as used in the prison environment. In the process they describe the thorny problems facing reformers.

• | Author: Andrew J Dick, William Rich, Tony Waters
• | Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• | Publication Date: Aug 05, 2016
• | Number of Pages: 334 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Hardcover/Education
• | ISBN-10: 1137564687
• | ISBN-13: 9781137564689