WASTED MINDS: Nevada Prisoners Have Little Access to Vocational Training

The Nevada Department of Corrections is understaffed and does not have enough teachers.  The Nevada Department of Corrections has gone years without preparing its prisoners to have a successful reentry into society.  

Prisoners have instead emphasized warehousing, creating an environment where prisoner idleness, surging staff turnovers, and a lack of incentives for good behavior have engendered heavy drug use.  

Learning new skills through hands-on training (and not solely being taught from a book) is so important for breaking cycles like poverty and prison sentences.  They can’t keep putting people in prison and not do anything to help them on the inside.

Thousands of offenders across Nevada will walk out of state prisons over the next five years.

Many will be worse off than when they went in.

The Nevada Department of Corrections offers virtually no meaningful vocational training classes where offenders can obtain know-how through hands-on training, despite overwhelming evidence that training is the strongest antidote to recidivism.  

Today, if reporters were to file a dozen public records requests with the agency for information on vocational training awards, violence, drug use, and staffing during the past decade, and then use those records to analyze programming in every prison, they’d find that what’s being stated is factual.  Journalists, lawmakers, Justice officials, educations, and the Director of the NDOC aren’t visiting and interviewing prisoners.  

Officials at the highest ranks of the prison system acknowledge the impact of vocational training on reducing reoffender rates.  One in three state prisoners are incarcerated for a money-motivated crime (e.g. robbery), but few are earning a trade they can utilize upon release into society to provide for themselves and their families.  

What’s needed from the NDOC is a shift in focus to vocational training (trades), emphasizing industrial training for mechanics, HVAC, carpentry, technology, construction, culinary, plumbers, and electricians.  Many of the certificates currently being offered are useless, because most classes are solely taught directly from a book without any hands-on component.

As vocational training evaporates, prisoners are left with more free time–institutions are getting more dangerous and are filled with more drug addicts.

Providing vocational training to prisoners is one of the strongest components in any plan to reduce recidivism, and is also critical to the safe operation of the Nevada Department of Corrections institutions.

When employers look at your record, and you have a felony, they’re less likely to hire you.  The only way to turn that around is by being skilled in a trade where you can be self-employed.  Entrepreneurship: it empowers people to do the right things.  The NDOC is not designed to help you despite their many claims online of assisting its offenders in having a successful reentry into society.  There is no hope, nothing that gives you the confidence that you’ll be successful in reintegrating into society.  The skyrocketing numbers of individuals who have reoffended in such a short period of time is a perfect indicator of how bad things have gotten.  It’s a problem for every prisoner, and these people are going to be coming home–living next to you in your communities.

The system is so broken…  They aren’t giving prisoners any useful training or assistance with transitioning back into society.  Prisoners are being warehoused, and then after they serve their sentence they are left to figure everything out on their own.  The vocational training that’s currently being offered is a joke. The books that we’re given to study are outdated.  We have no updated curriculums.  

What the NDOC badly needs are some apprenticeship programs run through the prison system, which include classroom work and on-the-job instruction with a sponsored employer–the more traditional route for those interested in fields such as plumbing.  

Many industry professionals scoff at the prison training.  While they agree with the concept of teaching prisoners a trade, they say offenders cannot adequately learn a skill like plumbing or cabinetry without proper hands-on experience.  

The Vera Institute of Justice, a New York-based human rights organization, found in 2019 that prisoners who took post-secondary education courses while incarcerated were less likely to reoffend and more likely to obtain higher earning jobs.  

Experts say increasing access to these programs could offer a solution to the prison crisis.  Those of us who are incarcerated would like to learn while we’re in prison.  We could have faith and confidence that we’ll live better lives, if only we had more control over our financial future.  It’s about becoming better people.

https://change.org/helptyreallreducerecidivisminnevada