Instead of keeping criminals in prison for years, money should be spent to send first-time offenders to college, according to the almost 20-year-old field of criminology called convict criminology.

Stephen Richards, associate professor of criminology at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh and author of "The User's Guide to Working the System," spoke on the benefits of convict criminology at a lecture Thursday.

"The majority of students in this school are former convicts, experts about the prison system. Each one of us is an individual miracle," Richards, an ex-convict, said.

Today there are approximately 2 million people in prison, he said. The majority of these prisoners are first-time offenders.

"The prison population has become much more diverse in terms of who is there," Richards said. "There are many men and women in prison who have the potential to go to college."

Former convicts are an "invisible minority" in society, said Richards, who served time in a federal prison and now holds a Ph.D. in convict criminology from Iowa State University.

Universities give former convicts virtually no assistance, he said. "Schools often do not want to admit they have students who are ex-cons."

The field of convict criminology was created in 1987. Some 400 people attended the first meeting.

"We were ex-cons, we were professors and we were coming out of the closet," Richards said. "If you want people to respect you, you've got to walk out of the closet and let people see you for who you are."

Today, there are between 24 and 30 masters and doctoral candidates who are former convicts across the nation, a group that is "overwhelmingly white male," he said.

There are several reasons for this, Richards said. It is hard for anyone, prisoner or not, to get into college. In addition, 95 percent of prisoners are male.

Women with children often have a harder time adjusting to getting out of prison than men, for they are expected to take care of their children after being released.

Jones also talked about "hell on Earth."

"The reality of prison is worse than anything you could ever imagine," he said. "You can take a nonviolent person and give them 20 years in prison, and they will become violent. It's not the person, it's the environment."

The field of convict criminology allows members to write from a prisoner's perspective.

"We do research, interview prisoners, mentor ex-cons, write books and keep up relationships with prisoners that have finished degrees," Richards said.

He said prison remains a part of his daily life.

"We live with one foot in the university and the other still in prison. We have friends that are back in prison," he said. "When we close our eyes at night, we see men in cages."

It costs an average of $28,000 a year to keep a person in prison, he said. For half that cost, Wisconsin could send prisoners to college through the university system.

"Locking men and women in cages is counter-productive," he said. "For the last year or two of a prison sentence, we should put prisoners in college."

Richards said criminals deserve a chance for rehabilitation.

"People might break the law, they might make a mistake, but you can't hold that against them for the rest of their lives," he said. "We want to give ex-cons a constructive way to improve their lives."

Nicole Lesniak, College of Arts & Sciences senior, thought the lecture was insightful.

"It offered a different way of looking at how to address the problem and what people can do when they get out of prison," she said.

Richard Jones, associate professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Sciences, said sending convicts to prison is a "really smart investment that we make, so that we give everyone a chance to live in a safer environment."

This article appeared in The Marquette Tribune on April 19 2005.