Journal Entry: Celeste Monette Blair-08/14/2024-Recidivism Rates

Journal Entry

Rumor Has It, It’s Hard Out There

You may recall, where I recently wrote that one of our biggest issues here at FCI Aliceville, is that we have no access to
Pell Grants, though it was decided in the FSA of November 2018 ( NOW 6 YEARS AGO ) that we were granted access to Federal Aid for College.

See for me, I was doing the work here on the ground. I read the First Step Act, in it’s entirety; like 600 pages. My friend and I got a copy of it as soon as it was accessible. We would work out all morning, well for 6 months this is what my average day looked like:

( mind you this is pre-pandemic- we moved with more freedom )
7:30 AM – to the gym/ elliptical / stretch / core
by 10 I was ready to go in and get some fish and rice with nuts and fruit
10:30 am we were sharing our healthy lunch over on the racquetball court, under the shade of the wall,
until noon- studying the FSA- page by page, concept by concept. We both had been teaching and programming in the BOP for some time, yet we had to reason some of it out, like try to get a vision of how this prison was going to pull this off.
They literally couldn’t keep soap in the bathroom – it seemed like a stretch.
None-the-less, we were elated by what we were reading.

The possibilities were endless. Finally, a way to literally program your way out of prison!

The FSA is also filled with deadlines for the BOP. I wonder now if there is a deadline for the implementation of PELL GRANTS. I noticed there were several deadlines for my case manager, yet when I asked him if he had read it, he had not.
I made him a copy and highlighted his parts.

At noon we would put it back in our gym bag and do strength training for an hour and half until it was time for racquetball.

So many people have left here and the message that is coming back, is that it is hard out there.
This makes me more determined than ever to get myself and my peers as ready as possible.

I read a statistic today:

The FSA Programs here will significantly lower the risk of recidivism to 43%.
Whereas higher education, a bachelor’s degree, lowers your recidivism rate to 4 %.
It is believed that education is the most direct route to true reform.

Think about this for one minute. The FSA was passed in 2018; this is when Congress held so firmly in the belief that in the higher education of inmates, there was enough reward to flip the bill. YET, HERE WE ARE 6 YEARS LATER and Aliceville has no access to PELL GRANTS. I am curious to know what the percentage of other BOP locations are not up able to facilitate.

I researched the situation more than once over the years, the popular consensus seems to be that there must be a person attached to a college to Procter the exams. So, is the money just sitting there? OR, is someone making off with it?

I could be an architect by now.
It’s fine, I shall be the architect of my own life.

” There is fire in the flint and steel, but it is friction that causes it to flash, flame, and burn, and give light where all else may be darkness. There is music in the violin, but the touch of the master is needed to fill the air and the should with the concord of sweet sounds. There is power in the human mind, but education is need for it’s development”

– Fredrick Douglass, 1894