This is a HeadGum Podcast. I don't know what you think I don't know what to say

you're the got to right

yeah it's okay

I don't know anything.

Hello everybody. Hello everybody, welcome to Factually.

I'm Adam Conover, and here's a question.

What is prison for? Like seriously, think about it.

What is it and why do we have it? People cannot agree on this point. Is it for punishment? Is it for rehabilitation? Or is it for what it increasingly

seems to be, which is, oh, we have isolating people we're frightened of far away in tiny boxes

so we don't have to think about, or look at them? What do you think? Well here's the thing, no matter

what you think about the answer to that question is, I think we can all agree

that the last thing we would want from a functioning prison system is for people to get out

then get arrested again and then go right back into prison right I think by any

metric that would be a prison system that's failing right well, that's exactly what's happening in our prison system right now.

Despite the fact that we have 2.1 million people in prison, when folks get out, they very quickly,

often right again, go right back in but this problem is not with

solutions there is a clear way to stop prisoners from being trapped in this

endless cycle and it's called education.

According to a big study by Rand, inmates who take part in prison education programs

have a 43% lower chance of recidivism than those who don't.

And prison education is also a good investment. For every dollar we spend on it,

we save about five bucks on the cost of imprisonment, and it even makes prison a better place,

...