Framework & application suite · Version 1.0

CORNERSTONE

A national framework for correctional campuses — and the five working applications that make it operable instead of theoretical.

Born Between 2 Generals

Roughly 95% of people in American prisons come home. The question was never whether they return to our communities. It is what version of them arrives.

CORNERSTONE turns the time between sentencing and release into the thing it should always have been: a period of structured training that produces a person with a credential, a job offer, treated clinical need, and a verifiable record — instead of a person with a release date and nothing else.


43%
Lower odds of return
RAND RR-266 / RR-564 meta-analysis — ~13 percentage-point risk reduction
$14.51
Returned per $1 invested
WSIPP benefit-cost, post-secondary correctional education — lifetime, 97% confident. The widely-quoted $4–$5 is RAND counting 3-year reincarceration cost alone: a floor, not a ceiling.
28%
More likely employed
RAND / DOJ release, 2014 — vocational participants

The floor comes first

Everything downstream assumes a building where a person can breathe. That assumption does not currently hold. A rehabilitation framework that opens with college programs while people are getting sick in the same building will be read as unserious, and it will deserve to be.

Part 0 — the habitability floor. Air. Water. Temperature. Medication continuity. Timely medical access. Freedom from sexual and physical abuse. Sanitation. A working grievance system. Verified by an entity that does not report to the corrections department.

Two structural failures sit underneath all of it: in a number of states, correctional facilities are wholly or partly exempt from the routine public health inspection that governs restaurants, schools, and nursing homes — and roughly half of states have no corrections ombudsman or independent oversight body with real access.

Five parts

0
The floor
The conditions of confinement everything else stands on. A campus cannot be built inside a building that is making people sick.
1
The campus model
A five-tier program architecture a facility can actually staff and fund.
2
The funding stack
Existing federal streams, matched tier by tier. No new appropriation required to start.
3
The national strategy
Four parallel lanes, because corrections is roughly 85% state and local and cannot be mandated from Washington.
4
The separation framework
Three independent axes replacing the single offense-label exclusion list that sinks most reform proposals.

Download the framework document (Markdown, v1.0 — July 2026)

The five applications

Each one runs entirely in the browser as a single self-contained file. No login, no server, no install. A family member on a phone in a parking lot outside a facility should not need an account, and a public defender's office should not need IT approval to open a web page.

FOOTING App 5 · The floor, made operable
Conditions reporting for families
A family member enters what is happening — mold, water, medication not arriving, assault, retaliation — and gets back every office with authority over it, how fast each one moves, and which ones do not require naming the person inside. The safety brief comes before the form. 51 jurisdictions, agency names only, no unverified contact ever rendered.
KEYSTONE App 1
Campus blueprint builder
Enter a facility's population, length of stay, and profile; get tier allocation, staffing at defined ratios, a cost and return model on RAND's figures, a funding stack matched tier by tier, and a 36-month build sequence. Includes a hard viability gate that refuses to produce a blueprint where length of stay cannot support one.
BEARING App 2
Three-axis classification engine
Enter a case profile; the three axes resolve independently and visibly. Surfaces the counterintuitive evidence when a profile would have triggered an offense-label exclusion, and carries the constitutional floor on screen. This is the app that makes the separation framework concrete instead of theoretical.
PARCHMENT App 3 · Build first
Portable credential ledger
Hash-sealed, transfer-proof credential record — each entry's seal includes the one before it, so an altered or removed entry breaks every seal that follows. The employer verification view has offense, sentence, facility, risk score, and clinical record structurally absent from the payload rather than permission-gated. There is no field to leak.
CHALKLINE App 4 · Research pass 1
50-state readiness report card
Fifty states and DC graded on six indicators: PEP approvals, Workforce Pell adoption, registered apprenticeship in corrections, occupational licensing barriers, Medicaid reentry waiver status, and earned-time structure. Every cell says whether it is verified, likely, or unverified; no jurisdiction is graded until at least four of six indicators are verified. It grades 1 of 51 and says so in large type instead of filling the grid with plausible guesses.

What it returns

Everyone quotes four to five dollars back per dollar spent. That figure is real, it is RAND's, and it is narrow — it counts reincarceration cost avoided over three years, to taxpayers, and nothing else. No earnings. No taxes paid. No crime that never happened to anybody.

Count the whole life and the number moves a long way.

Benefits per dollar of cost by program type. Post-secondary correctional education returns $14.51 per dollar at 97% confidence; employment counseling and job training $14.41; correctional education overall $8.04; basic skills $6.08; vocational $4.18; correctional industries $2.15. RAND's widely-quoted $4 to $5 range is marked as a reference band.
Bars grow past the RAND reference band. Static version: PNG · GIF
Why the two numbers differ, in one line. RAND asked "what does the prison system stop spending?" WSIPP asked "what is this worth to everyone?" Same intervention, different question — so quote whichever one your audience is actually asking about, and say which it is.

Sources: RAND IG-113 / RR-266 / RR-564, correctional education meta-analysis. Washington State Institute for Public Policy benefit-cost results, adult criminal justice — figures in 2023 dollars, benefit-cost methods updated December 2024, literature review May 2024; "confident" is WSIPP's own modelled probability that benefits exceed costs. Both are VERIFIED against the publishing body.

Watch how to use them

Every one of these is a narrated walkthrough of the real app — recorded off the live page, not a mockup — with captions. If a video shows a screen the app no longer has, the video is wrong and we want to know.

How to read what these apps tell you

Every factual cell across the suite says one of three things about itself: verified (checked against a primary source), likely (follows a known pattern or a secondary source — confirm before relying on it), or unverified (recorded but not yet checked). Only verified cells count toward a grade. Gaps are displayed rather than filled in. The coverage bar is a feature: it is what makes the grid trustworthy the first time someone checks a cell.

Nothing you enter leaves your device. These apps run entirely in the browser and transmit nothing. Work is held for the session only — export before you close the tab.