New York’s governor Andrew Cuomo believes paying for prisoners’ college educations can help cut costs.

Critics think the money is going to the wrong people. Inside Higher Ed’s Ry Rivard has the details:

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo wants to bring professors back into prisons 20 years after Congress and one of his predecessors cut funding for inmate higher education.

Congress and the Clinton administration ended Pell Grant funding for prisoners in 1994, effectively cutting off funds for most college education in prisons. New York followed suit a year later and made sure its inmates couldn’t get funding from the state’s Tuition Assistance Program either.

Now, Cuomo has proposed a plan — drawing fire from many — that he says will save money by giving prisoners a better chance to find jobs and stay out of trouble once they are released.

The federal and state moves in the 1990s left many prisons without any higher education offerings, except for relatively small programs offered by private groups. Cuomo’s plan is an unusual effort by a powerful politician to put real money into college programs behind bars.

“We’re imprisoning. We’re isolating. But we’re not rehabilitating the way we should,” Cuomo said this month when he announced the plan to a church gathering of the state’s Black, Puerto Rican, Hispanic and Asian Legislative Caucus. “We’re not correcting the way we should. We’re not improving the way we should.”

The governor wants to better-prepare prisoners for life after jail and cut New York’s recidivism rate of 40 percent, which is still below the national average.

Opponents of the plan, including state lawmakers with prisons in their districts, say law-abiding New Yorkers can barely afford college while the governor is trying to give a free education to the state’s crooks.

“Rewarding criminal behavior with free college education reinforces their actions and makes them smarter criminals,” Assemblyman James Tedisco, a Republican, said in a statement. “This is definitely ‘Breaking Bad’ by potentially turning a bunch of Jesse Pinkmans into Walter Whites – all on the taxpayer’s dime.”

Details of the plan will become clearer on Monday, when the governor’s office is expected to ask higher ed institutions to submit proposals for the plan. Cuomo’s initial goal is to provide a college education in 10 of the state’s 70 prisons.

The governor hasn’t said how much the plan will cost or where the money would come from, but one cost estimate is about $5 million a year. It takes about $5,000 a year to educate a prisoner, and about 100 prisoners enroll per prison, said Rob Scott, the director of Cornell University’s prison education program. By contrast, it costs New York about $60,000 to keep a prisoner behind bars.

“You could run this whole thing for about the cost of incarcerating 100 people,” Scott said.