The original intent of the thread was not to incite controversy, but since it's here...
When I first started teaching at the College of Oceaneering in 1993, student tuition was $13,500 for 50 weeks. This is roughly equivalent to the average annual tuition at UCLA at the time. By comparison, here are the average annual tuition rates of some other schools in 1993:
USC and Caltech: about $22,000.
Harvard Business School: $18,550.
California State university system: about $2,000.
Is it fair to compare the cost of putting an inmate through a vocational program to the cost of a private, for-profit commercial diving school?
Of course the inmate diving program is selective. They don't take violent offenders, and the attrition rate is high. The program is geared toward men who have the potential for rehabilitation, but could also easily return to crime upon release. There's no scientific way to predict what would have happened to program graduates had they NOT completed the program, and perhaps the recidivism rate of that select group would be less than the 65-odd percent of the California correctional system as a whole (source:
http://www.cdcr.ca.gov/Adult_Resear...ts/ARB_FY_0708_Recidivism_Report_10.23.12.pdf). I suspect, though, that it wouldn't be less than 7%.
This isn't the place for a philosophical argument about the American prison system, and I don't want to hijack my own thread. I do, however, think it's worth considering that students of the inmate diving program would be incarcerated anyway. While they're in prison, would we rather have them studying diving physics, or advanced carjacking techniques? Recompression chamber operation, or crystal meth synthesis and marketing? The inmate diving program is not a handout. It's an entire behavior modification program that, as
Superlyte 27 has pointed out, gives graduates something to be proud of. The rest of the correctional system would do well to take a lesson from it.