Virginia Knows Who Needs Prison School. It Doesn't Ask.

Virginia's Department of Corrections runs a validated statistical tool on every inmate in its custody -- the same COMPAS risk-assessment DOC already uses to decide who gets into other programs -- that scores how likely each one is to reoffend and how much education or vocational training would help.▸ In February 2025, that tool flagged about 9,200 inmates⧉, 40% of the state's roughly 22,700 state-responsible prisoners, as having a 'probable' or 'highly probable' need for that programming. DOC doesn't use the score to fill classroom or workshop seats. A November 2025 review by the Virginia legislature's watchdog agency, JLARC⧉, found the predictable result: seats going to inmates who don't need them while inmates the state's own data says need them most sit on a waitlist.

As of February 2025, about 2,650 inmates were enrolled in adult basic education (ABE) -- Virginia's core literacy and GED program -- and 43% of them, 1,134 inmates, had been rated 'unlikely' to need it⧉ to reduce their reoffending risk.▸ At the same time, 1,432 inmates on the ABE waitlist carried the opposite rating: 'probable' or 'highly probable' need. Career and technical education (CTE) programs -- welding, HVAC, electrical, masonry, the trades with real post-release job markets -- showed the same pattern at a sharper angle: 70% of the roughly 1,509 enrolled CTE seats, 1,046 of them, went to inmates rated 'unlikely' to need the training, while 1,308 inmates rated 'probable' or 'highly probable' need waited for an opening.

The waitlists aren't abstract.▸ Of the 1,219 inmates released in 2024 who had been on an ABE or CTE waitlist at some point, 45% had been assessed by DOC as needing that programming⧉ to cut their odds of reoffending -- and left custody without ever getting it. Nine percent of everyone DOC released in 2024, 623 people, walked out still on a CTE waitlist; 39% of them had been flagged as needing the training.

JLARC's own outcomes analysis, tracking inmates released between April 2022 and September 2024, found ABE participants did modestly better than similar inmates who stayed on the waitlist: 47% of ABE participants who earned a GED, and 37% of those who didn't, were employed in the second full quarter after release, against 30% for waitlisted inmates.▸ For CTE, the payoff is real but thin -- completers had better outcomes than inmates who stayed on the waitlist, but 49% still weren't employed in the first quarter after release and 67% didn't hold a job for all four quarters⧉. A 2018 RAND meta-analysis, cited by JLARC as national context rather than a Virginia-specific finding, estimated ABE programming can cut the odds of recidivism by roughly 30%; JLARC's own Virginia data found wage and rearrest differences between participants and waitlisted inmates were not statistically significant. The honest reading: the classes help some, modestly, and DOC's enrollment process isn't even trying to route that modest help toward the inmates its own data says need it most.

Part of why DOC can't fill the need-flagged seats is staffing.▸ As of May 2025, 14% of DOC's CTE instructor positions and 15% of its ABE positions sat vacant⧉ -- a vacancy rate that would have ranked among the ten highest of any school division in Virginia, against a 3.4% statewide public-school rate -- and open teaching jobs stayed unfilled for a median of 249 days. DOC says it would take $4.3 million to fully fund all 28 vacant educational positions; JLARC estimates filling them would open 700 to 1,100 more program seats. Underneath that is a correctional-officer shortage that makes classroom time impossible to guarantee in the first place: 1,534 CO vacancies statewide as of July 2025, reaching 64% at Greensville Correctional Center, in facilities a 2024 consultant's report called 'critically, and, in many cases, dangerously short-staffed.'

Some of the money DOC does have for education isn't reaching classrooms.▸ JLARC estimates $220,000 appropriated for education in FY2025 instead paid staff overtime⧉ at DOC facilities -- nearly half of it concentrated at Buckingham and Greensville, the same facilities carrying some of the state's worst correctional-officer vacancy rates. And the education division isn't even spending down what it has: it closed FY2025 with $250,903 unspent and FY2024 with $93,564 unspent, yet canceled a $35,000 professional-development conference for ABE teachers in 2025 because staff believed -- wrongly -- that the money wasn't there. Leadership didn't learn about the actual balance until too late in the year to spend it.