What efforts are being made, if any, at Sing Sing or other New York prisons, to rehabilitate inmates?
There’s a nominal effort. In many prisons, there are programs for alcohol and drug abuse and, occasionally, for anger management. But the most effective rehab you can offer an inmate is education and there’s practically no education going on past the high school level. That’s been shown to be the number one reducer of recidivism; post-secondary education. That’s a tool! Anyone can learn how to make a license plate, but to give someone some greater intellectual skills translates into a difference on the outside. That’s what we’re not doing and that, to me, is the big tragedy. Not everybody in prison can be rehabbed. It was an inmate who told me, “y’know, some of these guys were never ‘habbed’ in the first place!” And it’s a good point. You could spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and they would not be able to live as law-abiding citizens. For that reason, I’m glad we’ve got prisons. I think if you worked in one, you’d feel the same way. There are people you’d meet and think, “thank
