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Bill: Prisoner education act
Details
Submitted by[?]: Cooperative Commonwealth Federation
Status[?]: defeated
Votes: This is an ordinary bill. It requires more yes votes than no votes. This bill will not pass any sooner than the deadline.
Voting deadline: March 2041
Description[?]:
Schooling shall be made available in Lodamun's prisons on a voluntary basis to those prisoners wishing to avail themselves of the opportunity. This education shall be provided by volunteer teachers, ensuring that there will be no drain on the national treasury. |
Proposals
Article 1
Proposal[?] to change Education in prisons.
Old value:: Prisoners are not given any form of education.
Current: An education plan for prisoners is provided to improve rehabilitation.
Proposed: An education plan for prisoners is provided to improve rehabilitation.
Debate
These messages have been posted to debate on this bill:
Date | not recorded |
From | Chorus of Amyst | To | Debating the Prisoner education act | Message | Using volunteer teachers may reduce costs, yes, but there will still be costs involved with setting up the program - ensuring that volunteers meet certain requirements, structuring facilities to allow for education and possibly providing extra security for volunteers. Attempting to pass this while making education compulsory - which would provide jobs for teachers - will strain the education system if teachers do volunteer for this program, or simply cause this to fail as teachers do not volunteer and instead focus on their paying jobs. The CCF should choose one or the other if they must have these programs, as they cannot easily coexist and certainly cannot be introduced at the same time. |
Date | not recorded |
From | | To | Debating the Prisoner education act | Message | The Shylock Party retains the right to comment on this, pending the passing or rejection of the compulsory education bill. |
Date | not recorded |
From | Chorus of Amyst | To | Debating the Prisoner education act | Message | The Amystian Council appreciates the delay in moving to vote, as we would like to see the Shylock Party's comments after the defeat of the education bill. |
Date | not recorded |
From | | To | Debating the Prisoner education act | Message | The Shylock Party is in favour of the principle of improving rehabilitation by educational support. However, the use of volunteer teachers seems inefficient, given the Amystian Council's earlier comments on this. The Shylock Party recommends, instead, establishing library facilities at all prisons, which the prisoners may take advantage of to educate themselves. This has the double advantage of requiring less security expenditures, as well as being able to more accurately control a convict's access to information that would assist them in developing criminal skills. |
Date | not recorded |
From | Chorus of Amyst | To | Debating the Prisoner education act | Message | Library facilities would be more tolerable in the Council's eyes. The long term costs would likely be less than with a volunteer teacher program. |
Date | not recorded |
From | Cooperative Commonwealth Federation | To | Debating the Prisoner education act | Message | There are minimal costs involved in setting up a system of volunteer instruction -- less, for instance, than a ceremonial presidential guard, and certainly less than the cost of equipping proper libraries for every prison. An economy of scale operates here: books are expensive, and buying enough books for every prison is a costly proposition. A national certification programme for volunteer teachers will not cost much, espeically if the programme is also run by volunteers. This also raises a central issue of educational philosophy. It is the CCF's belief that education is best pursued as a group collaboration, where individuals learn from each other. This is why schools are preferred to home schooling, universities to national media outlets. Individual reading, or individual viewing of a national broadcasting network, is passive learning. Education in groups is active learning. |
Date | not recorded |
From | Chorus of Amyst | To | Debating the Prisoner education act | Message | A ceremonial presidential guard is simply altering the course of resources already granted to the military, reducing military capability almost negligibly in order to provide a boost in national identity and pride for no external cost. Additionally, a volunteer instruction system would still require additional security along with costs of certification of eligibility of each volunteer - and certainly we cannot leave such a thing in the hands of OTHER volunteers. While the short term costs of libraries would indeed be more expensive than the short term costs of a volunteer instruction system, the long term cost of libraries would be far lower. |
Date | not recorded |
From | | To | Debating the Prisoner education act | Message | On the contrary, when an individual is driven by sufficient desire for knowledge to study by themselves, of their own will, not because they are compelled to (such as a compulsory education bill would force them to), then this is truly active learning. Learning in groups, where one can easily hide in the mass, under an authority that lays out what you will learn crushes this kind of hunger for knowledge. Thus, the establishment of a library would only benefit those prisoners who truly wish to learn and better themselves, whereas with the volunteer instruction system suggested, prisoners might sign up for it just in hopes of getting time off for 'good behaviour', rather than out of a true desire to better themselves and society in general. |
Date | not recorded |
From | | To | Debating the Prisoner education act | Message | Also, hurrah for talking at the same time. The contrariness is at the CCF's last comments, not the Amystian Council's. Just thought I'd clarify. |
Date | not recorded |
From | Cooperative Commonwealth Federation | To | Debating the Prisoner education act | Message | Imagine my surprise. ;) ..... Libraries of course require continual purchase of new books, replacement for damaged volumes, and so forth. It seems the height of naivete to think that every prisoner going to the library is doing so to improve themselves. Libraries will require security guards too, after all. Only in a supervised, collaborative-learning setting (which, no matter how many times the Shylock Party repeats its mantra, is not a form of indoctrination) will the libraries be fuilly beneficial to the goal of rehabilitation. However, not to belabour the point. The CCF is happy to add a library component to the bill, but cannot agree to remove the component of group learning entirely. There is no rehabilitation value to one individual reading a book. One teacher, one day a week, seems a small enough concession to make to the needs of rehabilitation. |
Date | not recorded |
From | | To | Debating the Prisoner education act | Message | You continually push for control, for supervision, for compulsions... and yet claim it is not indoctrination. Very interesting, that point of view you have. |
Date | not recorded |
From | | To | Debating the Prisoner education act | Message | The compulsion is in the teacher or government dictating what the prisoner or student will or will not learn. Regardless, this argument is going in circles. We move that the bill either be dismissed, or brought to a vote. |
Date | not recorded |
From | Cooperative Commonwealth Federation | To | Debating the Prisoner education act | Message | Who said the government or teachers would decide what was being learned? A teacher is a resource person, not an instructor. This sort of "free school" environment is central to the CCF philosophy of education. However, moving to vote in the hopes that the other parties will not vote against based on what they THINK the CCF is trying to achieve here. |
Date | not recorded |
From | Chorus of Amyst | To | Debating the Prisoner education act | Message | The Council will not support the bill in its current form. Rehabilitation may be possible, but this method is not the way to go about it. |
Date | not recorded |
From | | To | Debating the Prisoner education act | Message | If the CCF does not wish their bills to be interpreted, perhaps they should provide more precise explanations. |
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Seats |
yes | Total Seats: 33 |
no | Total Seats: 33 |
abstain | Total Seats: 0 |
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