This whole piece reads like it's written by someone who has never set foot in an actual, general-population prison.<p>The scene it sets is of a collegial environment of highly motivated people who yearn to learn, and would commit themselves to pursuing a college degree, but for lack of access.<p>In reality, a large swath of the incarcerated population is not motivated to pursue additional education, or really any program that might help them get their lives back on track.<p>Part of it is because they frequently have underlying mental-health problems, addictions, learning disorders, or intellectual disabilities that often go undiagnosed or untreated in prison, and that must be addressed before they can get clear-headed enough to pursue their GED, let alone a college degree. Or they see a high-school or college diploma as pointless, either because they know the deck's stacked against them, or they don't know any other way of living.<p>So, it may be completely true that higher education is correlated with lower rates of recidivism, but that doesn't mean that increasing access to education _causes_ lower recidivism.<p>Rather, it likely means that people who are able and motivated to pursue higher education have lower rates and lower severities of mental-health issues or learning disorders, and a lack of those underlying issues predicts lower recidivism.