ADEQUACY AND APPROPRIATENESS OF VOCATIONAL EDUCATION TRAINING RESOURCES ON INTEGRATION OF PRISONERS INTO THE SOCIETY

This paper disseminates information from a dissertation titled “VOCATIONAL EDUCATION AND TRAINING FOR COMMUNITY REINTEGRATION AND PREVENTION OF RECIDIVISM IN KENYAN PRISONS.” The Kenyan government, in its push to improve on correctional institutions, introduced Vocational Education and Training(VET) in most of the prisons. The roll-out of the programs in these institutions has been successful but several challenges exist in the attainment of its desired goal. VET serves to impart skills to the inmates for the sake of enhancing their integration back into society. One of the issues evaluated in this extraction is adequacy and appropriateness of the resource materials and the impact it has on the inmates' integration back into the society. Questionnaires were used to collect information with different constructs explicating the resources available for VET delivery among different groups of study interest. Both qualitative data and quantitative data was collected. The data was then cleaned and analyzed using the Predictive Analytical Software (PASW). Descriptive statistics were used to describe demographic characteristics of the samples, frequencies across the different themes, and inference was made using simple linear regression. The regression model was found to be statistically significant with p<0.05. The regression coefficients were also found to be significant with p<0.05. The coefficient of determination was 0.368 and the correlation coefficient score was 0.608 meaning that 60.8% of the total observations were fitted into a linear model. The impact of adequacy and appropriateness was found to increase chances for integration into the society by 0.494 whenever there was a unit change in the appropriateness and adequacy of the resource materials. This paper recommends materials used to disseminate VET need to be assessed against the skill demands in the job market. In terms of the teaching materials, there is need to consider the environment that the inmates live in. Low stress conditions serve to ensure that the trainees are of good mental strength serve which in turn enables them to learn with ease.