UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Wednesday, March 8, 1995
9A
Pell grants won't finance prisoners' educations
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — For the past five years, Jason Nicholas has been prisoner 91-A-6991 at the Collins Correctional Facility in upstate New York, serving six to 19 years for killing a man.
For the past two of those years, Nicholas also has been a student at Medaille College, studying in a prison classroom each night for a bachelor's degree financed by the federal government.
Last year, Congress prohibited prisoners such as Nicholas from continuing to obtain federally financed Pell grants for post-secondary education. Last month, a federal judge threw out a lawsuit Nicholas had filed. In mid-May, Nicholas' school funding — and classes — end for good.
"That's the way it should be," said Rep. Bart Gordon, D-Tenn., who helped get the change through Congress." Every time a prisoner gets a Pell grant, it simply means a traditional student, someone who didn't commit a crime, is getting less."
But many of the officials who run the nation's state and federal prisons are mourning what they call a valuable program that became a political football. For a small amount of money, Pell grants to prisoners made a big difference, they argue.
Before the program was killed, some 28,000 prisoners received $36 million in Pell grants each year. Overall, Pell grants totaling $6.3 billion are awarded to about 4 million students annually.
Pell grants for prisoners are a tough sell, said former Federal Bureau of Prisons Director J. Michael Quinlan. Only the rare prisoner is ever rehabilitated, he said, but even turning around a handful is worth the program's cost.
that 90 percent of these people are coming out some day. It's not that they deserve it or that the government has a responsibility," Quinlan said. "It's really for our own, for society's sake."
"What we have to remember is
Utah's corrections officials felt so strongly about the benefits of education that they found enough state money to make up for the lost Pell grants.
In one program sponsored by Salt Lake City auto dealers, inmates learned to repair cars. Frequently, they got jobs from those dealers when they got out of prison.
"The more employable they are, the less likely they are to show up here again," said prison representative Jack Ford.
And the grants had another benefit. "We work very hard to keep a lot of bored, frustrated prisoners busy," Ford said. "That way they are less likely to become violent toward guards."
New York, facing its own budget problems, felt differently. Soon, its 3,500 inmates in college programs will go back to washing floors, fixing plumbing or mowing lawns. The state still will offer literacy and basic education classes.
But that won't be enough for the small, motivated group of prisoners able to turn their lives around with some help, said Eileen Bull, who directs Marist College's in-prison programs.
One of her former students got a computer programming job when he left prison. Two others are counselors. Several women work as paralegals, supporting children.
"What you see is a change in the way they think," Bull said. "They're not as narrow-minded. Some of them get a real thirst for knowledge."
But other prison officials believe any inmate motivated enough to study will do fine once released.
Even the program's staunchest supporters acknowledge it had severe problems.
One in infamous case, a for-profit trade school — called a proprietary school — collected Pell grant money on behalf of prisoners it supposedly taught. Actually, the prisoners just peeled potatoes in a prison kitchen.
Gordon heard from parents upset that their children couldn't get Pell grants because the parents made too much money, while prisoners with no income got the grants. The Justice Department already has an education budget of $60 million, and that money can be switched to make up for the Pell grants, Gordon contended.
"I'm not against the idea of trying to rehabilitate prisoners," he said. "But it's a matter of setting priorities. Let's face it, we have limited student aid money. It should go to struggling families."
Secondhand smoke linked to increase in infant deaths
The Associated Press
CHICAGO — Infants in households where people smoke are more than twice as likely to die of sudden infant death syndrome as those in smoke-free environments, a new study said.
The study is confirmation of earlier research that suggested that infants who breathe secondhand smoke faced an increased risk of SIDS, even if their mothers quit smoking during pregnancy.
The greater the number of smokers or the greater the number of cigarettes an infant is exposed to, the higher the SIDS risk, said the study's lead author, Hillary S. Klonoff-Cohen, an assistant professor of family and preventive medicine at the University of California at San Diego.
The study was published in last Wednesday's issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association.
"It's not enough for a woman to stop smoking while she's pregnant. It's important that she doesn't start up again after the birth of her child," said Kenneth C. Schoendorf, a SIDS researcher with the National Center for Health Statistics in Hyattsville, Md.
"It's also important that other people not smoke around the infant," said Schoendorf, who wasn't involved in the study.
SIDS is the sudden, unexpected death of an apparently healthy infant that remains unexplained after an autopsy and thorough investigation. It is the most common cause of death in the Western world of infants between 1 month and 1 year old, killing about 6,000 U.S. babies a year.
The researchers interviewed parents of 200 infants who died of SIDS in Southern California between January 1989 and December 1992, and parents of 200 similar healthy infants.
The infant was 3.46 times more likely to die if only the father smoked; 2.28 times more likely if only the mother smoked; and 2.18 times more likely if a live-in adult
other than a parent was the only smoker, the researchers said.
If more than one adult smoked, the risk of the infant dying was 3.5 times higher than for infants in smoke-free households, the researchers said.
Smoking in the same room as an infant pushed the risk even higher, the researchers said.
Klonoff-Cohen said she didn't know why the rate was highest when only the father smoked.
The SIDS Alliance, a nonprofit educational organization based in Columbia, Md., said the study did not suggest smoke exposure alone caused SIDS, but smoke apparently posed an increased challenge to a baby who already is vulnerable.
In the same study, the position in which babies were laid to sleep appeared not to matter in SIDS risk, contrary to numerous other studies, most done outside the United States.
Parents should continue to lay infants down to sleep on their sides or backs instead of on their stomachs, said the SIDS Alliance and other experts.
A separate study in Wednesday's JAMA from Tasmania in Australia, reported that the SIDS rate there had declined steadily since health officials persuaded many parents to place infants on their sides or backs to sleep instead of on their stomachs.
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