Teaching prisoners how to design and program websites turns out to improve their sense of self-worth and provides them with digital literacy skills th

Turns out teaching criminals to write web code keeps them out of prison

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2024-04-25 13:30:03

Teaching prisoners how to design and program websites turns out to improve their sense of self-worth and provides them with digital literacy skills that help them stay out of prison.

Boffins at MIT CSAIL and University of Massachusetts Lowell report that their Brave Behind Bars program, a 12-week college-accredited web design course for incarcerated individuals, has a demonstrable effect on the self-efficacy of people in prison.

Self-efficacy is a term used in psychology to describe "an individual's belief in his or her capacity to execute behaviors necessary to produce specific performance attainments." In less academic terms, it might be described as self-confidence or as the paper puts it, "the belief in one’s ability to execute behaviors necessary to meet a goal." And it turns out to be correlated with lower recidivism rates.

The US-based researchers – Martin Nisser (MIT CSAIL), Marisa Gaetz (MIT), Andrew Fishberg (MIT), Raechel Soicher (MIT), Faraz Faruqi (MIT CSAIL), Joshua Long (University of Massachusetts, Lowell) – describe their findings in a paper [PDF] titled "From Prisons to Programming: Fostering Self-Efficacy via Virtual Web Design Curricula in Prisons and Jails."