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Cheaper Than Graduate Students

By drorzel on October 21, 2008.

Lots of people talk about "Science 2.0" and "crowdsourcing" and the like. EurekAlert provides a story about taking it to the next level:

Nalini Nadkarni of Evergreen State College currently advises a team of researchers who sport shaved heads, tattooed biceps and prison-issued garb rather than the lab coats and khakis typically worn by researchers. Why is Nadkarni's team composed of such apparently iconoclastic researchers? Because all of her researchers are inmates at Cedar Creek Corrections Center, a medium security prison in Littlerock, Washington.

With partial funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Nadkarni has guided her unlikely but productive team of researchers since 2004, as they conduct experiments to identify the best ways to cultivate slow-growing mosses. Nadkarni's so-called Moss-in-Prisons project is designed to help ecologists replace large quantities of ecologically important mosses that are regularly illegally stripped from Pacific Northwest forests by horticulturalists.

I guess this would be... "gang-sourcing?"

Kidding aside, I think this is a great idea.You can get more details from Nadkarni's website, and Evergreen's Research Ambassadors page. We've got millions of people in prison, many of them for silly reasons, and any program that gives them something to do to better themselves and provide benefit to larger society is a Good Thing.

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Life Science
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prisons...modern day plantations? are they being paid normal wages? and by normal, i mean at least minimum wage. otherwise this definitely seems like slave labor.

Just wait till that Uni's continuing ed department figures out how they should get overhead on this.....

#2,

Probably not. It's not a new phenomenon, either. We've been selling prison labor for quite some time, it's just usually outdoor work.

prisons...modern day plantations? are they being paid normal wages? and by normal, i mean at least minimum wage.

Then they wouldn't be cheaper than graduate students, would they?

Note that the grad student stipend should have been $17,784.

I've been saying for decades that, for cost-effectiveness and value to society, nonviolent prisoners should be released from jail and put on probation at community colleges wearing GPS ankle bracelets.

Community college is cheaper than grad school OR prison.

Can't be worse than the gangster students that I've taught in high school, some of whom I really liked.

Jonathan Vos Post-
Now that's just crazy talk. Let's put the prisoners on probation at Vanderbilt or something. No sense in ruining perfectly good community colleges.

Funny, Becca. I've taught at a Community College, where I saw several major problems:

(1) There is an attitude among faculty and administration and staff that they are all second rate, and a tiny number knew that only one American community college professor ever won a Nobel Prize. They pass this low expectastion on to their students.

(2) The avergae student expecting to earn a 2-year Associate's degree actually spends 3.5 years, with all the remedial courses which do not count towards graduation, which purportedly make up for what they failed to learn free of charge in Public School.

I actually like community colleges. Within less than a mile of my alma mater Caltech is Pasadena Community College, which I think is a fine school by appropriate standards. Their radio station, KPCC-FM is my default listening at home. I've twice been on Larry Mantle's "Airtalk" show, and I think he's one of the finest interviewers, even compared to my network ABC-TV, CBS-TV, NBC-TV, Fox, and PBS appearances.

But I'm not joking about the relative cost of prisons versus schools.

And, by the way, I have tremendous respect for Dr. Roberta Pournelle, wife of Science Fiction author Jerry, who's done much volunteer literacy teaching in prisons. She and Jerry (with whom I don't always agree politically) understand Education. Which is why Roberta, as chair of thew Orange County GOP Committee (as I recall) was the first to seriously ask Ronald Reagan to run for Governor of California. But that's another story.

@ Becca,
I don't understand what the cost of housing/keeping the prisoner has to do with anything... It cost(s) slaveholders money to keep their slaves too.

and, yes, I know this type of thing has been doing on for awhile. That doesn't make me any more likely to support it.