Vocational education and training provision and recidivism in Queensland correctional institutions
This project investigates the nature of vocational education and training (VET) programs being delivered in correctional centres, including the factors assisting or hindering the delivery of these programs to prisoners. The research also statistically determines the factors most associated with reducing the rates of return to prison of offenders. A brief review of past research was undertaken and interviews with those involved in the corrections system were conducted. As well, various databases were examined to investigate the factors most associated with offender recidivism. The first part of this report provides a review of Australian and other research into the nature of offenders, and in particular, the links between reduced rates of offender recidivism and access to education, training and employment programs at the prerelease and post-release stages. This is followed by a discussion of the findings from 145 interviews with correctional staff, prisoners and trainers in several Queensland correctional centres. Interviews examined staff and prisoner perceptions of the factors facilitating or acting as barriers to the provision of VET programs in correctional institutions. The final section of this report uses quantitative methods to examine the characteristics of offenders who become involved in VET while in prison, and their recidivism rates. The research found highly motivated offenders engaging in and completing multiple VET programs which were not only providing them with technical skills, but which also improved confidence, self-esteem, and broader sets of generic skills. They were very positive about the role that prison staff and trainers were playing in assisting them to develop skills to help them to re-integrate back into the community upon release. The availability and access to dedicated training workshops in correctional centres as well as to outside trainers (and in some cases, tutors) who were highly professional and respectful of prisoner needs, and their often disadvantaged backgrounds, were further supports for the continued emergence of a throughcare approach to prisoner management. Significant evidence emerged from the analyses explaining the importance of pursuing a more integrated program which develops employment skills is that offenders involved in VET were less likely to return to the corrective system. On average, being involved in VET before initial release was associated with a decrease in the chance of returning.
Community safety and recidivism in Australia: Breaking the cycle of reoffending to produce safer communities through vocational training
Abstract This article links community safety with recidivism and argues that reintegration of offenders is a community responsibility. The paper discusses the role of vocational training for incarcerated offenders as a tool to reduce recidivism. Training and subsequent employment for released offenders are factors that assist them to become contributing members of community who are less likely to reoffend. Research has shown that prisoner training and education can successfully address recidivism rates. Therefore, the cost of incarceration is reduced whilst the level of community safety is increased. However, Australian Vocational Education Training (VET) delivery in prisons requires improvement and a greater emphasis on holistic support from community groups is essential for successful reintegration.
Mining Words in the Minds of Second Language Learners: Learner-Specific Word Difficulty
While there have been many studies on measuring the size of learners’ vocabulary or the vocabulary they should learn, there have been few studies on what kind of words learners actually know. Therefore, we investigated theoretically and practically important models for predicting second language learners’ vocabulary and propose another model for this vocabulary prediction task. With the current models, the same word difficulty measure is shared by all learners. This is unrealistic because some learners have special interests. A learner interested in music may know special music-related terms regardless of their difficulty. To solve this problem, our model can define a learner-specific word difficulty measure. Our model is also an extension of these current models in the sense that these models are special cases of our model. In a qualitative evaluation, we defined a measure for how learner-specific a word is. Interestingly, the word with the highest learner-specificity was “twitter”. Although “twitter” is a difficult English word, some low-ability learners presumably knew this word through the famous micro-blogging service. Our qualitative evaluation successfully extracted such interesting and suggestive examples. Our model achieved an accuracy competitive with the current models.