April 8, 2019, 12:01 pm
Many prisoners broadly share common traits. These include: little education, emotional or mental health issues, addiction or chemical dependency, dysfunctional family histories, aggressive or abusive behaviors, anger issues, and perhaps lesser known–financial ignorance or irresponsibility. Many of these traits contributed to criminal behavior for a good number of incarcerated men (and women?). This is perhaps why the Department of Corrections has tried to address some of these issues. They push prisoners to get their GEDs, provide limited psychological services, and require addiction therapy/classes and assaultive behavior therapy/classes.
Nevertheless, in my decade in prison, I have yet to see a single class offered on financial responsibility. In fact, I have seen the DOC actively work to hinder prisoners from learning personal financial skills. At one prison where I was housed, several prisoners with accounting and other financial backgrounds and degrees put together a personal finance, peer-facilitated class to help their peers learn financial responsibility. These skills included:
* Learning how to write a check and balance a checkbook
* Creating and living within a budget
* Building credit and using it wisely
* Discerning the benefits of home ownership or renting
* Understanding mortgages and savings accounts
* Becoming a responsible taxpayer, and
* Knowing the differences between assets and liabilities
This proposed class was rejected, without reason, by the warden; however, other non-financial, peer-led classes were approved, like Study Skills, Basic Math, and English Grammar and Punctuation.
Prisoners usually have little or no experience with the above financial skills. Many have never had a “legitimate” job, nor owned a bank account, let alone a house. In fact, many prisoners do not manage the little money they have in prison well. Many use unwise and wasteful spending practices, like using the store man and gambling.
The store man is another prisoner who purchases store items and “loans” them to other prisoners at a 50% markup. If you borrow two soups from the store man, you must pay back three on store day, two weeks or less away. I know of many prisoners who routinely owe $30 (sometimes much more) to the store man every store day, at least a third of it as interest. This is gross financial irresponsibility, but it happens all the time.
Even in a prison facility where men are trained with vocational skills so they have the abilities they need to get and keep a job upon release from prison, teaching them how to manage that money is not valued by the Department. Another financial responsibility class, very similar to the one above, was recently denied by the warden at this facility, who is probably the most reformist and prisoner-friendly warden in the state of Michigan. This class would cost the MDOC nothing, and it would teach prisoners the skills they need to avoid financial crises.
So, the MDOC is training prisoners with skills that will help them to start out in jobs earning $15 or more an hour, but they oppose the same men learning skills for managing that money when it comes in. It’s a disaster waiting to happen. It just makes no sense. One must ask why the Michigan Department of Corrections is so opposed to its wards learning financial responsibility?
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Author: hopeontheinside.blogspot.com
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