College Inside

'If they ever open the door, watch what I can do'

Charlotte West — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 14:48:00 +0000

A biweekly newsletter about education and employment during and after incarceration. Written by Open Campus national reporter Charlotte West.

David Carrillo spent three decades dreaming about getting out of prison. Here's what he's built after two years of freedom.

David Carrillo was released in January 2024 after receiving clemency from Colorado Gov. Jared Polis. Photo courtesy of David Carrillo.

In January 2024, David Carrillo became one of the first incarcerated people in the country to teach a college-level course to other incarcerated people — and then, days later, walked out of a Colorado prison after Gov. Jared Polis granted him clemency, citing his educational and professional accomplishments. Open Campus and Chalkbeat Colorado covered that story, which won a first-place feature writing award from the Colorado chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. This past January, Carrillo marked two years of freedom — and his discharge from parole — with a "freedom bash" celebrating not just his own milestones, but the friends and fellow formerly incarcerated people around him who are out and building their lives. College Inside caught up with him on what the last two years have actually looked like.

This interview has been edited lightly for length and clarity.

Charlotte West: Give me the quick recap — what have the last two years looked like since you walked out the prison gates more than two years ago?

David Carrillo: I had numerous ideas of what I'd like to do if I was ever released from prison — because I was doing life without the possibility of parole. I used to dream up ideas all the time. I would say to people, if they ever opened up the door for me, watch what I can do.

When I got out, I finished my ABE [adult basic education] certification through Red Rocks Community College, and they offered me a position as an adjunct instructor. I also continued teaching for Adams State.

I launched my own consulting business focused on plea bargain analysis. It grew out of my years as a jailhouse attorney on the inside, where guys would come to me because they didn't understand what their plea bargain actually meant — how it would affect their classification, their facility, their mandatory programming. They wanted to file ineffective assistance of counsel claims, grievances against their attorneys. That work evolved into what I do now: helping people understand how the type of plea, the type of felony, affects your earned time, your good time — all those elements that get overlooked when someone accepts a sentence.

In addition to your teaching, you also started your own business. Why might entrepreneurship be a good option for people coming home, and what are the real challenges?

I had visions and dreams — and one of the ideas that was ruminating when the door opened was this consulting idea. I needed to pursue it, at least to try. The challenges, though, are real. There's no secure paycheck, no benefits. I have to pay for my own insurance, pay my own taxes. There's a lot that goes into running your own business that people don't really understand until they're living it. Even with an MBA, the books don't teach you the subtleties — especially when it comes to entrepreneurship. I'm discovering new challenges as I go, and doing my best to navigate through them.

You mentioned there's a new full-time position you've taken on — can you give us a preview?

I'm now the lead facilitator for Legislation Inside, or ALLY, at the Corey Wise Innocence Project at University of Colorado Boulder. It's a legislatively mandated, codified program — 40 currently incarcerated individuals, elected by their peers across facilities in Colorado, are involved in public policy. They push forward bills, testify at committee hearings, write letters in support or opposition. I was one of the first elected representatives on the inside, and I testified at the capitol when the bill to codify the program passed. It's a full-time position.

David Carrillo, an adjunct professor with Adams State University, talks to his Intro to Macroeconomics class held in a Colorado prison in November 2023. He was the first incarcerated person in the state to teach a college-level class to other incarcerated people. He was released in Jan. 2024. (Photo: Rachel Woolf for Chalkbeat)

You've stayed involved in prison education since your release — and gotten more connected to the field nationally. What has that been like?

When I was released, I was given a fellowship with Jobs For the Future Horizons, and I was invited to a conference in Washington, DC, where I spoke on higher education in prison. Then I was invited to apply for the first cohort of the Rockwood Leadership program for higher education in prison. And then I went to the National Conference on Higher Education in Prison.

What I didn't realize was the scope of it. I had no idea how many people behind the scenes were even making it possible for me to become the first incarcerated college professor. And then I get to the JFF Horizons conference and there are thousands of people there — formerly incarcerated individuals doing amazing things across the country. Organizations like Ascendium, the Alliance for Higher Education in Prison. I mean, I've met a lot of people. It was great to see how many people out there are working to help provide opportunities for individuals to come home and find success.

You also wrote a memoir. Tell us about it.

It's titled Kiko: From Life Without Parole to Life With Purpose. It wasn't difficult to write — I'd been sharing those stories for years while teaching Seven Habits on the inside. When I came home and everybody was on me about writing my story, I sat down and it came out.

I've been doing author talks at colleges across Colorado — Red Rocks, Pueblo Community College, Colorado Mountain College, University of Northern Colorado. The response has been strong across a lot of different departments: psychology, criminal justice, sociology. I write about entering the foster care system at a very early age, juvenile detention, going into prison as a teenager, solitary confinement — statistically, my life was almost destined to end up in prison. And then how I took control and found myself on the opposite end of those statistics. I became the outlier. I was supposed to die in prison. But here I am.

What were some of the unanticipated challenges of reentry that caught you off guard?

I had listened for years to guys talk about the anxieties of coming home — walking into a store, going to a restaurant, all these people and overwhelming choices. I paid attention and did my best to prepare. And then I found myself sitting in the house one day, my girlfriend at work, no TV on, no music playing, just sitting in this depression, hurting real bad.

And I couldn't walk out the front door. I would look out the window at the street and want to go outside, but I was waiting for someone to call ‘movement’. For years at higher-security facilities, you can't just leave — they have to give you permission, open the door, call movement. I was waiting for permission that wasn't coming. I wouldn't even go into my own backyard. If someone called me up and said, hey, let's meet up, let's go have lunch — that was like permission for me to leave. I had my pass.

Going into the refrigerator was another one. My girlfriend had stocked it with food she thought I'd like, but I wouldn't open it. In prison, you don't go into your cellmate's box. Even though it was my food, in my mind that was her box — until she said I could help myself, it felt off limits. If I hadn't been self-aware about my own emotions and where those things can take you, something as simple as being afraid to open the refrigerator could have taken me somewhere bad.

What would you say to people inside about the value of a degree?

Education is going to give you a huge boost, a head start — but put it in perspective. Don't assume that just because you got the education in prison, you've got it all figured out. And don't assume you don't need it, because you absolutely do. The letters behind your name add credibility. You may be the smartest person in the room, but without those letters, sadly, a lot of people aren't even trying to hear what you have to say. Keep a mindset of continuous learning, and stay open — that's where community comes in.

Ascendium is a financial supporter of Open Campus. Read our editorial independence policy here.

Let’s connect

Please connect if you have story ideas or just want to share your experience with prison education programs as a student or educator. You can always reach me at charlotte@opencampusmedia.org or on Bluesky, LinkedIn, or Instagram. To reach me via snail mail, you can write to: Open Campus, 2460 17th Avenue #1015, Santa Cruz, CA 95062.

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Earning a degree behind bars is difficult. Finding housing after release can be harder.

Charlotte West — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 01:11:12 +0000

A biweekly newsletter about education and employment during and after prison. Written by Open Campus national reporter Charlotte West.

Short on time? Here’s what you need to know:

The number of people coming home from prison with college degrees is expected to increase with the return of Pell Grants. Recognizing that housing underpins successful reentry, some prison education programs are expanding their services. College Inside visited Hudson Link in New York State.
In a first-person essay we published last year, incarcerated writer Kwaneta Harris asks: how can prisons celebrate Black History Month while banning the very books that tell Black history?

Formerly incarcerated graduates face another hurdle on the outside: stable housing

Hector Gonzalez in June 2024, after he moved into a house run by Hudson Link, a prison education nonprofit in New York. Residents can focus on building careers, pursuing graduate degrees, or simply saving money — goals that would be difficult or impossible while scrambling to meet basic needs. Photo: Babita Patel for Open Campus

Marc Rowley and Hector Gonzalez walked through the door of Hudson Link's office in downtown Ossining empty-handed. The two men — both formerly incarcerated graduates of the organization’s prison education program — had just returned from the DMV, where Gonzalez had tried to get a driver’s license. It was the first official ID he’d ever had. But they'd hit a snag: he needed proof of address.

The two men met years earlier at the nearby Sing Sing Correctional Facility, New York’s oldest prison. Rowley was now 18 months into his own release and living in housing Hudson Link operates for formerly incarcerated alumni. When Gonzalez asked for help navigating the DMV — just three weeks after his release from serving more than 28 years in prison — Rowley's response was immediate: "I'll take you myself."

In the office where returning alumni regularly drop in for support, a Hudson Link staff member overheard their conversation. They pulled out a blank envelope, wrote down Gonzalez's address — one of Hudson Link’s houses in Ossining — and dropped it in the mail. Gonzalez could return to the DMV the following week with proof of address in hand.

For formerly incarcerated people like Gonzalez, earning a degree behind bars is only the first step toward rebuilding their lives. But without stable housing, the rest becomes nearly impossible. For Gonzalez, Hudson Link’s housing allowed him to get an ID, find employment, and build a foundation — tasks that would have been extremely difficult without a permanent address.

And the need for such support is growing. With the return of Pell Grants for incarcerated students in 2023, the number of people coming home with college degrees is expected to increase, according to Ruth Delaney, director of Vera Institute's Unlocking Potential initiative. Recognizing that housing underpins successful reentry, some prison education programs are expanding to provide their alumni with a place to live alongside job assistance and other support.

In New York, Hudson Link, which has offered college courses in prisons for more than 25 years, now operates reentry housing that provides rent-free accommodation and wraparound services to help its alumni rebuild their lives. In California, several campuses of the California State University system have opened dedicated housing for formerly incarcerated students. Thousands of miles east, the Tennessee Higher Education Initiative opened three houses in the Nashville area in 2024.

Formerly incarcerated people are 10 times more likely than the general population to be homeless, due to factors including scarcity of affordable housing, public housing bans for certain criminal records, employment barriers, and rental policies that bar people with criminal records. For formerly incarcerated college students specifically, 36% experience homelessness.

More than two decades ago, when Sean Pica was a student in the same program he now leads, he wrote his capstone project on a manual typewriter while incarcerated at Sing Sing. It was a research proposal for using formerly incarcerated people to rehabilitate dilapidated homes in impoverished communities.

Years later, Pica had that yellowed capstone sitting on his desk when a donor stopped by. The different fonts from the manual typewriter caught her eye. When Pica explained he'd written it 19 years earlier while living in Sing Sing, she wrote a check for $500,000 on the spot.

"We bought a house before we even planned it," Pica says.

More and more Hudson Link alumni were coming home, and Pica saw a gap: "New York has a tremendous amount of incredible reentry support, but not reentry support for formerly incarcerated college educated people."

Read the full story.

Related coverage: What it’s like to graduate behind bars

‘They ban books by Black authors. Then they tell us to celebrate Black History Month.’

Kwaneta Harris writes about the reality of censorship in a Texas women’s prison during Black History Month.

Photo by Charlotte West

The state asks us to celebrate Black History Month within these concrete walls, yet their very education system perpetuates erasure. In the high school readiness programs offered in Texas prisons, textbooks still cling to the sanitized narrative that the Civil War was merely about “states’ rights.” The same texts refer to enslaved people as “migrant workers,” a calculated distortion that obscures the brutal reality of chattel slavery.

While recent headlines focus on the dismantling of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives across America’s higher education system, such erasure of diverse perspectives is nothing new behind prison walls. As state legislatures and boards of regents debate whose histories deserve telling, those of us behind bars have long faced explicit bans on texts that challenge dominant narratives or examine racial and gender justice.

As an incarcerated Black woman, the hypocrisy is particularly stark. The “celebration” of Black History Month entails posters of MLK, George Washington Carver, and Rosa Parks plastered around the education building. The display in the library has lots of kente cloth borders and a table with self-help and religious books by “safe” Black authors.

This is the same prison library that bans works by Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, bell hooks and other Black female intellectuals under the guise of preventing “critical race theory indoctrination.” The selective censorship of Black feminist authors reflects the system’s fear of Black women who speak their truths.

Read Kwaneta’s full essay.

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State coalitions emerge as key infrastructure for higher education in prison

Charlotte West — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 00:33:12 +0000

A biweekly newsletter about education and employment during and after incarceration. Written by Open Campus national reporter Charlotte West.

Short on time? Here are the highlights:

This week, we look at the emergence of state coalitions for higher education in prison at a conference organized by the Colorado Coalition for Higher Education in prison.
Our local network partner, WBEZ, published a version of my story on a new report about earned time.

How do you get everyone on the same page?

Photo by Bryan Reckard/University of Colorado Denver

On a Friday afternoon in late January, directors of prison education programs, state higher education officials, corrections administrators, and nonprofit leaders gathered in Denver to discuss a challenge facing colleges working in prisons across the country: How do you get everyone on the same page?

The Colorado Coalition for Higher Education in Prison organized the conference with support from ECMC Foundation, bringing together experts from New Jersey, Tennessee, Texas, Florida, Wisconsin, and other states to share strategies for building effective statewide coordination. As prison education programs have expanded following Pell Grant restoration in 2023, states are racing to build the infrastructure needed to coordinate multiple institutions, navigate complex funding streams, and remove policy barriers.

That infrastructure is becoming a competitive advantage—and it’s absence can create problems. Students lose credits when transferred between facilities if colleges don’t coordinate and employment barriers persist when agencies don’t align on certification requirements. Individual colleges working alone also often lack leverage to address systematic issues with departments of correction or influence policy—problems that require collective action.

When Jobs for the Future's Fair Chance to Advance initiative announced funding for State Action Networks in January, 31 states applied. The organization selected four: Oregon, Kansas, North Carolina, and Maine. Each state will receive funding, facilitation services, and technical assistance to expand postsecondary opportunities and remove policy barriers.

Rebecca Villareal, senior director at Jobs for the Future's Center for Justice & Economic Advancement, said states with active coalitions stood out in the selection process.

"The states that were most competitive and … most ready for systems change could point to active consortia that have a clear governance structure," Villareal said. "There are strong relationships and working collaborations within the institutions in those consortia. And so that certainly sets states [that are] really thinking about ecosystem coordination apart."

Villareal said the most successful model often has an external organization serving as the neutral convener rather than a single college or university taking charge. When individual institutions lead, there's a risk that conflicts of interest can emerge around enrollment, funding, and credit transfer. A nonprofit can ensure all participating institutions benefit equally.

In Texas, Alexa Garza founded the Texas Center for Higher Education in Prison to serve that neutral convening role. The Center brings together stakeholders who weren't previously communicating with one another across a large, decentralized state. Since 2023, Texas has grown from 11 to 25 colleges offering prison education programs, with about 2,700 students enrolled, she said. But the Center is still building basic infrastructure — hiring staff, establishing its nonprofit status, creating bylaws — while navigating complex dynamics between colleges and state agencies and other organizations.

Sean Mueller, a recent graduate of University of Colorado Denver who began his degree while incarcerated, conducted research on coalition development across two dozen states for the Colorado coalition. He said success comes down to priorities: "Getting all the groups that deliver that education together and getting everybody to play in the sandbox together is just crucial, with the understanding that it's not just about who controls what, but putting the student first.”

Mueller's research also found that larger states face greater challenges establishing and maintaining coalitions due to more facilities and stakeholders. Budget concerns and territorial issues over resources remain persistent challenges, he said.

Villareal also noted that collective advocacy carries more weight with policymakers and departments of correction than individual institutions working alone.

New Jersey offers an example of what mature coalition infrastructure looks like. Chris Agans leads New Jersey Scholarship and Transformative Education in Prisons, known as NJ-STEP, which has woven together multiple institutions under different funding models into a coordinated statewide system.

The state offers an associate's degree program run entirely on Pell funding at scale across all New Jersey prisons. Because it's the same degree statewide, students can transfer between facilities without losing credits. Bachelor's degree programs supplement Pell funding with private and state money. Master's programs use a combined class model, bringing outside students into prison classrooms at a 2-to-1 ratio. he outside students' tuition covers the cost of delivery, Agans said during a panel.

Private institutions like Princeton don't matriculate students but contribute technology, research fellowships, and curriculum development to the collective effort.

The model works because New Jersey's Department of Corrections has strong central authority that allows coalition members to negotiate moving students between facilities and allocating classroom space to maintain the right balance of enrollments across different degree levels.

Colorado's coalition brings together six public colleges and universities, two private institutions, state agencies including the Department of Corrections and Department of Higher Education, and community organizations focused on reentry support and advocacy. One of the policy issues the coalition is tackling is extending the Colorado Opportunity Fund, state-level financial aid, to incarcerated students. Members of the coalition are working with state lawmakers and recently met with Gov. Jared Polis to discuss higher education in prison funding.

In early February, State Rep. Matthew Martinez (D - District 62) introduced a bill to create a working group focused on Colorado Opportunity Fund eligibility. The state financial aid program supplements Pell grants, but extending it to incarcerated students requires solving a state funding formula problem.

The working group will bring together prison education providers, the state Department of Higher Education and other stakeholders to develop recommendations for implementation. If the working group delivers recommendations by December, he plans to sponsor a bill extending the state financial aid to incarcerated students in January 2027, Martinez told Open Campus.

Molly Lasagna, senior strategy officer at Ascendium, pointed to a strategic shift among some funders at the conference. Speaking about Ascendium's approach, she emphasized focusing resources on states with political support for prison education rather than trying to work everywhere.

"Because of where we are right now with our administration, for the next several years our best approach is to try to really double down in the states where there is state-level support, and try to pour as much money and resources and attention into the states where we feel like there's bold action and political cover," Lasagna said.

Several patterns emerged from the Colorado gathering. Successful coalitions coordinate across sectors, bringing together colleges, state agencies, departments of correction, community organizations, and people with lived experience. Colleges alone can't address the barriers formerly incarcerated students face around employment, education, housing, and collateral consequences. Credit transfer policies and financial aid eligibility similarly require coordination across agencies, experts said.

Lasagna said stakeholders need to come together to address state-level barriers like certification and licensure requirements. "There's no way for us to address those unless we're talking about a coordinated approach at the state level," she said, "which means state agencies talking to each other, sharing data with each other, and looking in the same direction."

Ascendium is a financial supporter of Open Campus. Read our editorial independence policy here).

New & views

This section is written by Vee Santoscoy, an Open Campus editorial assistant supported by the Humanities Institute at the University of California Santa Cruz.

Lawmakers are re-introducing The Prison Libraries Act, a federal bill that would create a Department of Justice grant program to expand and strengthen prison library services, aiming to increase educational opportunities, support reintegration, and reduce recidivism for people who are incarcerated. The bill has broad support from organizations such as the American Library Association, crediting the potential benefits of expanded access to books, digital tools, and skills training for incarcerated individuals.

Following the release of the 2025 documentary The Alabama Solution, the incarcerated activists — who provided cell phone footage from inside their facilities for the film — Raoul Poole, Robert Earl Council, and Melvin Ray have been reportedly taken from their facilities and transferred to an extreme solitary confinement unit in Kilby Correctional Facility, where they have been held since mid-January, according to The Appeal. The Alabama Solution is now streaming on Amazon Prime, HBO Max and Hulu.

Additional coverage on an Ohio bill from our local partner newsroom, Signal Cleveland, examines proposed legislation that could end college and career-technical education programs in the state’s higher-security state prisons, a move that could significantly reduce educational access for incarcerated people. In a recent op-ed from the Columbus Dispatch, guest columnist and assistant professor of social work and faculty in the Prison Education Program at Wilmington College, Laura Mishne Heller questions the intent of the bill: “By pairing harsher penalties with the removal of educational opportunities, the bill conflates accountability and rehabilitation into a single response, raising serious questions about safety and effectiveness.”

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The Recordkeeping Problem Keeping People Locked Up Longer

Charlotte West — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 17:57:25 +0000

A biweekly newsletter about education and employment during and after incarceration. Written by Open Campus national reporter Charlotte West.

Illustration by Emily Jenkins for Open Campus

‘No Good Time For You’

More than 2 million people are currently incarcerated in the United States. Nearly every state now has some form of time credit program, often called “earned time,” that allows people to reduce their sentences through education, work, or good behavior. Since 2020, 27 states have expanded these laws.

But a new study examining time credit policies in 11 jurisdictions, including the federal Bureau of Prisons, found that outdated technology and fragmented recordkeeping systems routinely prevent incarcerated people from accessing credits they’ve legally earned — sometimes keeping people locked up longer than they were supposed to be.

At least 370 lawsuits have been filed in the past decade — 70 against state agencies and over 300 in federal court — alleging failures in tracking time credits. Incarcerated individuals won about one-third of the state cases.

The findings arrive at a critical moment: states have expanded credit-earning opportunities faster than they’ve modernized the systems needed to run them. The result, the report shows, is a growing gap between what the law promises and what people inside actually receive.

“What we found is that implementation — not intent — is the barrier,” Jessica Hicklin, founder and co-executive director of educational technology nonprofit Unlocked Labs, told Open Campus. “Outdated data systems, inconsistent credit calculations, and fragmented program tracking have turned a promising evidence-based reform into a patchwork of inequity and missed opportunity.”

The findings draw from 34 interviews with correctional professionals and formerly incarcerated individuals conducted in 2025. Unlocked Labs conducted the study in partnership with Arizona State University with support from Arnold Ventures.

In many systems, the technology to solve these problems already exists but is underutilized. Tablets have been distributed across facilities but are rarely used for tracking credits or providing access to records.

Participants called for integrated digital systems, automated credit calculations, full use of tablets for transparency, and clearer policies.

The report concludes that “reforming the laws is not enough. Effective time credit policies require the operational tools and digital infrastructure to ensure accountability, consistency, and fairness.”

Hicklin, the Unlocked founder, said the fixes are within reach. “This is fundamentally an infrastructure problem, and infrastructure problems have solutions,” she said. “States can build transparent, automated, and reliable systems that ensure earned progress leads to earned release.”

Read the full story here.

An inside look at college in Indiana Women’s Prison

Addison Pijnappels (left) and Amy Hockett (right) are students in Marian University’s college program at the Indiana Women’s Prison, the only women’s prison in Indiana to offer a bachelor’s program. Photo: Charlotte West/Open Campus

Amy Hockett had been through it before. A college program would arrive at Indiana Women’s Prison with big promises — degrees, a path forward, a chance to transform her life.

She’d enroll, start classes, get through a semester. Then the program would disappear.

It happened again. And again. By the time Marian University showed up in 2019 with its liberal arts program, Hockett wasn’t buying it. She’d already earned her GED during her lengthy sentence and worked through self-help programs to “become a better person.” She’d heard the college pitch before.

“We had so many college programs here that started and failed,” she said. “A lot of us are like, ‘yeah, I’m not going to waste my time for a semester.’”

But Marian stuck around. And now, in her fourth year, Hockett is graduating with her bachelor’s degree this fall — one of around 50 women who’ve earned associate or bachelor’s degrees from the program since it launched.

The Women’s College Partnership, run by Marian in collaboration with the Bard Prison Initiative, represents a rare opportunity in Indiana. It’s a chance for incarcerated women to earn a liberal arts degree, the kind of education that asks students to read deeply, think critically, and engage with big ideas.

Read the full story by Charlotte West and Claire Rafford published in collaboration with our local partner in Indianapolis, Mirror Indy.

News & Views

This section is written by Charlotte West and Vee Santoscoy, an Open Campus editorial assistant supported by the Humanities Institute at the University of California Santa Crus.

About one in four people incarcerated in Virginia are waiting to access prison education programs due to limited capacity, staffing shortages, technology and infrastructure, as well as inconsistent programming, according to a November story published by the Virginia Mercury. As of February 2025, around 5,700 individuals were on waiting lists for educational programs, highlighting the demand that far surpasses the state correction department’s capacity, according to a legislative report prepared at the request of state lawmakers. As Open Campus has previously reported, other states such as Illinois are now starting to track the amount of time that someone is on a wait list before they are able to access education.

An Ohio prison safety bill sparked by the murder of a correctional officer has passed the state House 82-3—but buried in the legislation is a provision that would eliminate all college programs at high-security prisons, the Dayton Daily News reports. The proposed law would potentially affect around half of Sinclair Community College's 2,600 incarcerated students and also removes tablets for personal use at high-security facilities, which criminal justice scholar Jonathan Morgan says eliminates “the only realistic pathway to structured learning” for many in maximum security. None of the eight higher education institutions offering prison programs in Ohio—including Ohio-based Ashland University, one of the country's largest tablet-based education providers—publicly testified on the bill during the House committee. The bill now heads to the state Senate.

A new Colorado State Library study shows that prison libraries do far more than provide books—they improve mental health, strengthen social connections, and encourage positive behavior. Despite challenges like limited collections and staffing, incarcerated people consistently praised their libraries as rare safe spaces where they can connect with others, manage emotions, and build community. Researchers say strengthening prison library services can improve well-being behind bars and support successful reentry to families and communities. The project has also created a toolkit for other state library systems.

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One prisoner's fight to expand work release jobs in Wisconsin

Charlotte West — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 20:51:21 +0000

A biweekly newsletter about the education during and after incarceration. Written by Open Campus national reporter Charlotte West.

A photo illustration shows a letter Ben Kingsley wrote to Warden Clinton Bryant about the lack of jobs for people incarcerated at Winnebago Correctional Center. Kingsley contacted Wisconsin Watch with his concerns, and reporter Natalie Yahr investigated. Credit: Photo illustration by Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch

This week's issue of College Inside comes from our partner newsroom Wisconsin Watch, where Natalie Yahr reports on an incarcerated man's push for more work release jobs. Wisconsin pioneered the century-old program that lets prisoners earn real wages, but jobs are scarce and officials don't track participation numbers.

A century after pioneering work release, Wisconsin corrections officials don't track how many prisoners participate

By Natalie Yahr, Wisconsin Watch

Most of the jobs available to Wisconsin prisoners are paid not in dollars, but cents. Minimum wage laws don't apply behind bars, so some people scrub toilets for less than a quarter an hour.

But one type of job lets people leave prison for the day to earn the same wages as anyone else.

Wisconsin was the first state to offer this opportunity, known as work release. The century-old program matches the lowest-risk prisoners with approved employers, who are required by law to pay them as much as any other worker. In some cases, that's more than $15 an hour.

Through those jobs, prisoners boost their resumes, pay court costs and save up for their release. Employers find needed workers. And taxpayers save money, since work release participants must pay room and board.

Ten of the state's 16 minimum-security correctional centers are dedicated to work release. But prisoners at those facilities say there aren't nearly enough of those jobs to go around, and officials at the Department of Corrections say they're not keeping count.

One prisoner told Wisconsin Watch he believes less than a third of those eligible at his facility have such work release jobs. Prisoners routinely wait many months for the opportunity, he said, and many never get it at all.

"Having that money saved up to, say, get an apartment or get furniture, or even money for transportation?" said Ben Kingsley, 47, who wrote to Wisconsin Watch in August from Winnebago Correctional Center, a work release center in Oshkosh. "These guys know what's at stake … They want to go out to work."

Only prison officials can add more positions, and he questions whether they're trying. This summer, he began lobbying prison officials and lawmakers to expand the opportunity.

Work release jobs are scarce, prisoners say

To qualify for work release in Wisconsin, a prisoner must be classified in the lowest custody level and have permission from prison officials. In Wisconsin, people approved for work release can work only for one of the Department of Corrections' partner employers.

"Placements cannot be guaranteed for all eligible inmates," reads Winnebago Correctional Center's official webpage. "Work release and offsite opportunities are a privilege, not a right, and are provided at the discretion of the center superintendent and warden."

About 70% of eligible people incarcerated at Winnebago don't have work release jobs, Kingsley estimates. Of the 295 people incarcerated at Winnebago at the end of October, 224 had the lowest custody status, which is required for work release, according to the Department of Corrections. By Kingsley's calculations, just 67 have work release jobs. That's less than one in three.

"Oh gosh, it's a huge concern," Kingsley said.

Officials offer explanations. Not everyone who's eligible wants a work release job, said Department of Corrections spokesperson Beth Hardtke. Some are in education, therapy or substance use treatment programs that don't allow them to work full time. And those who seek work release must first work at least 90 days in a prison job, followed by a stint on a "project crew" supervised by Corrections staff, before getting permission from the warden or superintendent.

"The capacity of the work release program is not just about the number of jobs available," Hardtke said. "The program must be limited to the number of individuals that DOC staff can safely support and in settings where we can safely support them."

Officials and prisoners tout benefits

Work release got its start in 1913 when the Huber Law, named for Progressive Republican lawmaker Henry Allen Huber, created the opportunity at Wisconsin's county jails. It later spread to state prisons and to nearly every state in the country.

More than a century later, Wisconsin prison leaders continue to extol the virtues of letting people leave prison and return at the end of their shifts.

"Work release gives the men and women in our care the opportunity to feel like they belong to something, to feel like they're part of a positive contribution to the community," said Sarah Cooper, then-administrator of the Division of Adult Institutions, at a virtual presentation for prospective employers in 2022.

Research suggests people who participate in work release programs are less likely to return to prison. A study of former prisoners in Illinois from 2016 to 2021 found those who had held work release jobs were about 15% less likely to be rearrested and 37% less likely to be reincarcerated.

Work release also offsets some of the taxpayer costs of imprisonment. Each participating prisoner must pay $750 a month for room and board, about 20% of the roughly $3,650 a month the state pays to incarcerate each prisoner in the minimum-security system. They must also use their wages to make any legally mandated payments, including child support and victim restitution.

For men in Wisconsin prisons, work release jobs are usually in manufacturing. For women, there are jobs in food service or cosmetology too. They're "low-level, intensive labor jobs," Kingsley said, but people are eager for the chance to start saving, especially since a criminal record and gaps in work history could make it tough to find work when they get out.

"When you get locked up, you lose everything," Kingsley said. "The benefit (of working) far outweighs the negatives."

No statewide data available

How many prisoners participate in work release statewide? Corrections officials don't consistently keep track, Hardtke said.

The department's public data dashboards show prisoner demographics, recidivism rates and enrollment in educational or treatment programs, among other things. Employment numbers are not included.

The latest numbers Wisconsin Watch could find are from 2024: 781 people had work release jobs in July 2024.

Asked for a current figure, Hardtke said "that number is not something we have readily available."

Officials also don't track how many people are eligible for work release. As of Oct. 31, 2,778 Wisconsin prisoners were at the department's lowest custody level.

Several neighboring states routinely track how many people have work release jobs or are eligible for them. Of the 11 other Midwestern states Wisconsin Watch asked, seven responded, and most said they track participation numbers.

Prisoner pushes for more jobs

In July, Kingsley wrote to Warden Clinton Bryant, who oversees the men's minimum-security centers, asking him to add 100 more work release jobs. Adding those jobs would generate $75,000 a month in room and board payments, along with state taxes, he wrote.

Bryant responded that Winnebago Correctional Center "collaborates with community employers on a daily basis" and that prison officials can't require employers to hire anyone.

When Kingsley contacted Bryant again, urging the department to establish minimum job placement rates for work release centers, the warden ended the conversation. So Kingsley took the issue to the State Capitol.

As of publication of this story, Kingsley has yet to receive a reply.

Read Natalie’s full story.

This story is part of our partnership with Wisconsin Watch, a nonprofit newsroom focused on government accountability and quality of life issues in Wisconsin.

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This class helps incarcerated men learn about fatherhood

Charlotte West — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 21:05:37 +0000

A biweekly newsletter about education during and after incarceration. Written by Open Campus national reporter Charlotte West.

Demetrice Brown (center) talks about his family and how he plans to navigate his role as a father at the final class in the Fathers and Families Center’s Up and Out program Nov. 14, 2025, at the Duvall Residential Facility in Indianapolis. Credit: Stephanie Amador for Mirror Indy

This week's issue of College Inside comes from our partner newsroom Mirror Indy, where Claire Rafford writes about a class giving incarcerated men the tools they need to be emotionally supportive parents. Men who want to participate in employment programs offered by the Indianapolis-based non-profit Fathers and Families Center have to complete parenting classes as part of their curriculum.

‘Our most important goal is to create better fathers, and employment is one part of that.’

William Blade wants to be a “patient, discerning and all-in dad.”

It’s something he thought about a lot working through a parenting class he took while incarcerated at Duvall Residential Facility in Indianapolis. Though he hasn’t seen his kids — ages 8 and 10 — in several years, he’s realized how important his role as their dad is.

“I do matter,” Blade, who is 30, told Mirror Indy. “I have to be in their life.”

The class was part of Fathers and Families Center’s Out and Up program, an Indianapolis-based non-profit that offers parenting classes to men who are incarcerated. Most of the men in the classes are fewer than 90 days from being released. This latest cohort is the first graduating class at Duvall, an alternative to jail where men live but can leave to go to work or school.

Fathers and Families Center offers a similar class to dads who are not incarcerated. Completing the fatherhood curriculum is required for any dad who wants to participate in the organization’s other programs, such as construction training.

“Employment is not our primary goal,” said Larry Smith, president and CEO of Fathers and Families Center. “Our most important goal is to create better fathers, and employment is one part of that.”

Former NFL wide receiver Corey Parchman speaks to men in the Fathers and Families Center’s Up and Out program Nov. 14, 2025, at the Duvall Residential Facility in Indianapolis. Credit: Stephanie Amador for Mirror Indy

Fatherhood 101

Through the classes, Fathers and Families aims to give men the tools they need to be emotionally supportive parents.

“The vast majority of the men we serve grew up in a home in which their father was not present,” Smith said. “Part of it is literally just learning, what does a father do? How is the father supposed to be?”

Instructor Brian Carter estimates that he’s taught parenting classes to close to 1,000 dads over decades working as a social worker. As part of that, he encourages men to think about their own dads, and how their experiences have shaped how they think about fatherhood.

“You can’t get stuck in the past,” he said. “You have to say, ‘I’m going to be different. Even if my dad was a good dad, I’m going to be a better dad.’”

It’s important to Carter that his classroom is a judgement-free zone, where men can speak openly about topics that are sometimes considered taboo. Dads talk about everything from potty training to creating family traditions to why kids might be getting suspended from school.

“If you don’t understand development, discipline is going to be a disaster,” Carter said, “because you’re not understanding, this is what (kids) do.”

Brian Carter, the parenting facilitator, teaches the final class in the Fathers and Families Center’s Up and Out program Nov. 14, 2025, at the Duvall Residential Facility in Indianapolis. Credit: Stephanie Amador for Mirror Indy

Fatherhood, inside

Kemontez Beatty signed up for the parenting class to be a better role model for his three young kids.

“I don’t want them to follow in my footsteps,” Beatty, who is 29, said.

He’s hoping that enrolling in construction training classes with Fathers and Families will help set him up for success.

“I want to actually build something,” Beatty said, “Take pictures of it to show to my kids, ‘This is what Daddy did. I built it.’”

From left, Justin Martin and Maurice Bullock look over notecards, made by children in the community to support the graduating class of the Fathers and Families Center’s Up and Out program Nov. 14, 2025, at the Duvall Residential Facility in Indianapolis. Credit: Stephanie Amador for Mirror Indy

Blade is also planning to take the construction classes, because he likes working with his hands and wants a career.

When he does get back in touch with his children, Blade said he wants to be in a position where he can be in their lives for good. Completing the parenting class is one step towards that.

In the meantime, Blade is thinking of the moment when he’ll get to see his kids again.

“I’m just gonna hold them for a good, strong three minutes,” he said. “That’s a long time.”

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Parole boards say education matters. Their denials tell a different story.

Charlotte West — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 21:25:34 +0000

A biweekly newsletter about higher education during and after incarceration. Written by Open Campus national reporter Charlotte West.

A 2024 college graduation at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in New York. Photo by Babita Patel for Open Campus.

After 24 years in prison, a 58-year-old woman went before California’s parole board for the first time with what looked like a strong case for release. She had earned an associate’s degree and was working toward a bachelor’s at Cal State LA. She had completed years of programming, earned praise from correctional staff, and hadn’t had a violent disciplinary infraction in more than two decades.

At a hearing in the fall of 2023, a parole commissioner started with some good news: "You've done everything objectively speaking that we want you to do." Unfortunately, there was a problem: "the subjective part of you hasn't quite gotten to the surface that you've addressed it to the depth that you need to." Figuring out exactly what those words meant was confusing, but the final decision was clear. The board denied her parole.

The exchange reflected a conundrum familiar to many incarcerated people seeking release—meeting every official requirement isn’t always enough when decisions hinge on something much harder to pin down.

California is one of 35 states that allow people to appear before a parole board, which decides whether they should be released before their sentence ends based on factors such as conduct, rehabilitation, and perceived risk. California granted parole in only about one in five cases in 2024, according to the nonprofit Prison Policy Initiative, or PPI.

The California woman’s case echoes findings from a new two-part analysis by the organization examining how parole boards operate. The remaining states have effectively eliminated parole altogether—a trend that continued in 2024 when Louisiana became the 17th state to abolish it.

Image courtesy of the Prison Policy Initiative.

The report describes a parole system that’s politically motivated, under-resourced, and often dysfunctional—with declining approval rates and fewer hearings despite a national backlog of more than 200,000 people incarcerated past their parole-eligibility dates. The PPI report finds that those problems are especially apparent in how parole boards weigh education and other programming—achievements often framed as a sign of transformation but very often dismissed or ignored. While states such as Massachusetts and Pennsylvania explicitly direct boards to consider an individual’s educational or vocational progress, the report shows that in practice these achievements rarely outweigh other factors.

About half of the 35 states list education as a forward-looking factor in release decisions, but the reality is more complicated. The report finds that even though educational accomplishments can help someone's case, they are often dismissed as insufficient—or even used as negative strikes if applicants are unable to complete them.

“Parole statutes pay lip service to important dynamic factors, like rehabilitation, preparation, public support, and education, but too often issue denials for static factors, like the original crime, or overly subjective factors, such as the optics of releasing someone who has been convicted of such a crime,” the authors write.

All 35 states require boards to consider the “seriousness” of the crime of conviction, even though judges already weighed that at sentencing. Six states go further, requiring boards to consider whether release would “diminish” respect for the law—a standard focused on optics rather than an individual’s readiness for release, according to the report.

The crime is the one factor people can’t change, yet it often carries the most weight. Degrees, completed programs, and years without disciplinary issues may demonstrate rehabilitation, but they rarely offset the original offense in the eyes of the board.

Image courtesy of the Prison Policy Initiative.

And even the efforts meant to show change can become obstacles. Education and program participation appear frequently in parole guidelines, but the standards can be impossible to meet. The Prison Policy Initiative describes this as a kind of bureaucratic gridlock—parole boards decide the criteria for release, but corrections departments control access to the programs applicants are required to complete. Classes are often canceled, full, or unavailable, leaving people unable to finish what the board requires.

Board members may question these gaps in an applicant’s educational record, even when due to factors beyond the applicant’s control. “Board members may see an incompletion, withdrawal, or other ‘gap’ in an applicant’s record and start to ask questions, even if those changes occurred because of a transfer, illness, or a sincere schedule conflict,” the report notes.

Those contradictions leave many people unsure how to demonstrate readiness for release. A college degree might show a commitment to change, but, as the report suggests, it doesn’t guarantee a fair hearing. “Parole can be denied for nearly any reason at all,” the authors write. “Such denials send a harmful message: the parole board neither recognizes nor rewards transformation.”

Another California transcript shows how boards discount education. In 2022, a man with two associate degrees was denied after 24 years. His programming was neutral, the board said—recent disciplinary infractions proved he lacked real insight into how his programming could help avoid the choices that led him to prison in the first place.

The 58-year-old woman heard similar. Her rehabilitation was "primarily intellectual in nature." Despite her degrees and extensive programming, she hadn't done enough internal work to prevent future harm.

Taken together, the hearings mirror a broader pattern identified by the Prison Policy Initiative report. Educational achievements often become secondary to subjective judgments about whether someone has truly changed. The authors of the report argue that presumptive parole—a system that assumes release once someone has met the state's criteria unless the board provides a specific reason for denial—could move states toward “a fairer framework centered on success and transformation.” They also urge policymakers to focus on measurable signs of change—participation in education, treatment, and work programs—rather than static factors that applicants can never alter.

Read the full PPI report here.

Interested in learning more about the politics of parole? Illinois abolished discretionary parole in 1978, but a handful of people convicted before then remain eligible. Ronnie Carrasquillo was one of them. The PBS documentary "In Their Hands" follows Carrasquillo—who was denied parole more than 30 times despite earning a bachelor's degree in theology and founding education programs in prison—through his decades-long fight for release. The film explores how political pressure and police union influence shape parole board decisions. Watch it here.

Illinois edition of College Inside out now

Last week, Prisoncast! our partner at WBEZ Chicago, sent out the latest print issue of the Illinois edition of College Inside to more than 400 individuals residing in the Illinois Department of Corrections. The issue included an analysis of new data on education waitlists, a story on Augustana College’s recent graduation, a profile of a man who transferred from Illinois to Minnesota to attend law school while still incarcerated, and a round-up of criminal justice news from around the state.

Next, Prisoncast! is teaming up with a group of formerly incarcerated actors and writers to broadcast a new radio play. "The Story of Violence," based on an award-winning script by playwrights at Dixon Correctional Center in Illinois, examines Chicago’s gun violence problem through five characters’ perspectives as their lives intersect at a downtown hotel room. Listen to "The Story of Violence," from WBEZ & Mud Theatre Project, on Thursday, Nov. 6th at 7 p.m. central time on wbez.org.

The 2026-2027 FAFSA for incarcerated students now available

The official 2026-27 FAFSA for incarcerated students is now posted on the NASFAA Prison Education page. Both the English and Spanish versions of the 2026-27 forms are available and ready for use. They are not currently available on the Education Department website due to the government shutdown.

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The waiting game

Charlotte West — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 18:09:52 +0000

A biweekly newsletter about higher education during and after incarceration. Written by Open Campus national reporter Charlotte West.

Short on time? Here are the highlights:

Last week, the Illinois Department of Corrections released a first-of-its kind report on higher education enrollment and waitlists. Open Campus dug into the numbers for a story with our local newsroom partner, WBEZ Chicago.

For every incarcerated student in Illinois prisons, another waits their turn.

Incarcerated Lewis University students sit during a class inside Sheridan Correctional Center, which is located about 70 miles southwest of Chicago. Charlotte West/Open Campus

For every person enrolled in higher education at Illinois prisons, someone else is waiting for their turn, according to new state data that reveals a system where access to college depends largely on where someone is incarcerated.

Right now, roughly 2,000 people in Illinois prisons are participating in higher education programs, according to a report released at the beginning of September. That’s about 1 out of every 15 people incarcerated in the state. At the same time, though, another 2,000 are stuck on waiting lists to get into classes because there’s not enough programming available.

Another 700 people on supervised release — Illinois’ version of parole — are also enrolled in higher education, per the report. Those numbers include enrollment in both college classes, and career and technical education.

People in Illinois prisons have been on waiting lists an average of 1.3 years, according to an analysis by Open Campus. Rebecca Ginsburg, director of the Education Justice Project at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, said the data about how and where incarcerated students are being served allow colleges and the Illinois Department of Corrections to make informed decisions about higher education in Illinois prisons.

“The fact that around 2,000 individuals are on waitlists — almost the same number as are actually enrolled — suggests that we need to greatly scale up [higher education in prison] in Illinois,” Ginsburg said.

Research shows that participating in prison education helps people find employment after release and helps keep them from going back to prison. In Illinois, some people who complete educational programs can also earn time off their sentences, allowing them to be released earlier.

That means lots of people locked up in Illinois want to get into higher education programs, but they routinely complain about long waitlists, or that programs simply aren’t available at many prisons.

“Some of the things that hold programs back from sustainable growth include access to classroom space inside prisons and funding,” Ginsburg said.

How long’s the wait? Depends on geography

The data show wait lists vary wildly across Illinois, depending on the prison. The longest waits in the system are at Logan Correctional Center, the state’s main women’s prison, where people have been on an education wait list for an average of almost five years. The longest wait at a men’s facility is at Danville Correctional Center, where people have been on wait lists an average of 4.2 years.

The system generally prioritizes educating people who are the closest to being released, but this leaves some behind for decades.

At Big Muddy River Correctional Center, one person has been on a waitlist since 2006 — nearly 19 years — and many others have been waiting more than five years. At Logan, at least seven women have been on the wait list since 2013. Most of those with the longest waits are serving life or other long sentences.

IDOC spokesperson Naomi Puzzello acknowledged the geographic disparities, saying the department is “optimistic” about expanding education with current and potential education partners, particularly in central and southern Illinois, where the need is greatest.

Many of the longest wait times are at the facilities that offer the most educational opportunities. Logan, for instance, is the only Illinois women’s prison that offers significant higher education opportunities, including a bachelor’s program from Northwestern University and a master’s program from North Park University.

Danville offers classes from the U of I, as well as associate’s and bachelor’s degrees. At Sheridan prison, the waitlist has grown significantly in the last few years with the facility absorbing Northwestern’s bachelor’s program when Stateville Correctional Center shut down in 2024. It’s also home to other programs, such as Lewis University.

Some facilities have very short waitlists — not because they efficiently serve students, but because they offer very few educational opportunities. Menard Correctional Center, the state’s largest maximum security men’s prison, has just eight people enrolled in higher education and eight people on the waitlist. The facility, located in far southwestern Illinois, offers only two training programs — building maintenance and small engines — but no college classes, according to the IDOC website.

Pontiac Correctional Center, a men’s maximum security facility housing almost 500 people, shows no waitlist because it offers only basic education and high school equivalency programs — no college classes, according to the IDOC website.

Waitlist time down for high school-level courses

The statewide enrollment figures may appear to overstate the scope of prison-based higher education. Around 700 people — or a quarter of those the IDOC reported as being enrolled in higher education — are on supervised release. That means they are enrolled in outside institutions, not participating in prison-based classes.

The waitlists extend beyond higher education to basic literacy and high school programs. Nearly 12,000 people participated in adult basic education and high school equivalency programs, with over 5,000 more waiting for access. The report doesn’t break down these waitlists by facility, but data on educational spending shows disparities across institutions.

Puzzello said that wait times are down significantly for students earning their high school equivalency within IDOC.

“With increased education staffing across facilities, more students are enrolling in and completing programs, including successfully meeting testing requirements for credentialing,” Puzzello wrote in an email to WBEZ.

The data comes from a first-of-its-kind report on prison higher education published at the beginning of September. In 2023, Illinois lawmakers passed legislation requiring IDOC to annually publish detailed data about enrollment, waitlists, and spending on educational programs.

Scott Smallwood, Open Campus’ co-founder and CEO, contributed to the data analysis in this story. This story was produced in partnership with Prisoncast!, WBEZ’s engaged journalism project for people incarcerated in Illinois.

News and views

A new report from the University of Puget Sound found that thousands of incarcerated students are enrolled in college courses but lack access to the critical academic supports available to students on traditional campuses. This report calls on universities to extend their campus-based teaching and learning resources into the higher education in prison programs.

ITHAKA S+R released a new analysis examining the challenges of collecting reliable data on higher education in prison programs. Based on interviews with program leaders, corrections staff, and researchers, the report identifies barriers to building sustainable data systems for this growing field.

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Four takeaways from our survey on college and career after prison

Charlotte West — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 16:25:30 +0000

A biweekly newsletter about the intersection of higher education and criminal justice. Written by Open Campus national reporter Charlotte West.

Short on time? Here’s what you need to know:

• Join me, Charlotte West, along with Lawrence Bartley and Martin Garcia of The Marshall Project, next week for an Alliance for Higher Education in Prison Community Conversation about navigating the media and how journalists go about their jobs. Come and ask all the questions you have about how we cover the higher ed and criminal justice systems during this webinar on Monday, Aug. 18 at 3pm eastern.

• This newsletter was nominated for the Breaking Barriers Award from the Institute for Nonprofit News.

• Today we're sharing a few takeaways from our survey on college and career after incarceration. We partnered with Jobs for the Future's Center for Justice & Economic Advancement to gather insights from nearly 100 formerly incarcerated people about their experiences with higher education and the job market. There’s more to come, but we wanted to share some of the common themes people shared.

• ICYMI: This story we published last month details how federal funding cuts have outsized consequences for formerly incarcerated people. And don’t forget to check out Kun Lyna Tauch's essay about how AmeriCorps funding cuts affected him.

‘Don't assume you're limited to trades or manual labor’

Photo by Charlotte West for Open Campus

This spring, in collaboration with Jobs for the Future's Center for Justice & Economic Advancement, College Inside launched a survey on college and career after incarceration. Nearly 100 formerly incarcerated people filled it out, sharing insights from their experiences with navigating higher education and the job market. (The survey remains open for anyone who wants to contribute their experiences.) Some of the most striking responses were about what people wish they had known before they came home. Here are a four takeaways:

People assume degrees will open all doors while not always understanding what career paths their degrees actually enable.

Many respondents assumed that having a bachelor’s degree would immediately translate into a career, while others weren’t aware of the possible career paths they could take.

Maria Garza, who continued her bachelor's degree at Northwestern University after being released from the Illinois Department of Corrections, said she thought that just having a degree from a top ranked university would secure her a great job. "That would be true only if we knew what type of jobs the degree supports," she said, noting the disconnect that sometimes occurs between academia and employers.

This echoes what we heard during a listening session earlier this year with our partner WBEZ Chicago at Sheridan Correctional Center, where students pointed to the lack of basic information about professional paths. People often have limited aspirations because they don't know what's possible.

"Don't assume you're limited to trades or manual labor," wrote Jarret Orcutt, who now works in higher education in Nevada, in his survey response. "If you want to be a professor, a coder, or run your own nonprofit—you can."

Tech is a barrier in job searches. Learning digital skills can also help build social capital.

After years or decades without technology access, people are expected to navigate a digital job market. Basic skills like filling out online applications or using LinkedIn become major barriers. L.Elizabeth Shatswell was able to secure her current position because she debated with her now-boss on a LinkedIn post — but as she noted, you need digital literacy from the very beginning just to complete job applications.

This aligns with what we found in our previous survey about technology use in prison, where respondents consistently highlighted the gap between the digital skills needed for reentry and what's available inside.

Learning digital skills can also help build social capital. As Shatswell's experience shows, being able to engage professionally online — whether through LinkedIn comments, joining industry groups, or maintaining a professional network — can open doors

Higher education in prison can be transformative, but lack of experience remains a hurdle when job searching.

Education provides crucial personal development and opens minds to new possibilities, but employers still prioritize practical work experience that's difficult to gain while incarcerated.

"Employers did not care about my education when I was released. They wanted experience," said Tommy DeLuna, who recently graduated from Sacramento State University in California.

In response to this gap, organizations like the Alliance for Higher Education in Prison and JFF are developing work-based learning initiatives to help bridge this experience gap, as we've previously reported.

The most valuable reentry information came from other formerly incarcerated people, not formal programs.

As we've heard before during our listening session in Chicago, peer support can be one of the most valuable resources for reentry.

"The most important source of information wasn't a website, a book, or a flyer — it was people," said Elon Molina, an alum of the Bard Prison Initiative in New York state who now works as a learning and development specialist for a roofing company. "Conversations with others who had already walked the path after release were my greatest resource."

But the networking challenge goes deeper than just information sharing. Professional success often depends on personal connections — something that can be particularly difficult for formerly incarcerated people who may have limited professional networks or whose previous connections may no longer be relevant to their post-release goals.

College Inside nominated for INN's Breaking Barriers Award

We're excited to share that the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) has nominated this newsletter for its Breaking Barriers Award, which recognizes reporting that brings new understanding to an issue or topic affecting people or communities that are historically underrepresented, disadvantaged or marginalized, and results in impactful change.

It is the first INN Nonprofit News Awards nomination for Open Campus. INN — which is a membership organization of hundreds of nonprofit newsrooms — received more than 600 entries in total for its awards this year. We’ll find out if we won on Sept. 10.

New and views

JFF, with support from Ascendium, has launched an RFP for Fair Chance to Advance State Action Networks, selecting four states to receive up to $2.1 million in funding each to expand high-quality education and training programs in correctional facilities. States interested in applying must submit a nonbinding letter of intent by August 26, 2025, with full proposals due October 14, 2025. Learn more here.

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"AmeriCorps gave me a bridge back to society. Then Trump cut the funding."

Charlotte West — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 19:46:37 +0000

A biweekly newsletter about the intersection of higher education and criminal justice. Written by Open Campus national reporter Charlotte West.

Federal funding cuts have outsized consequences for formerly incarcerated people

Kun Lyna "K" Tauch is an Americorps volunteer at The Prism Way, a Los Angeles-based reentry organization. Photo courtesy of Kun Lyna “K” Tauch.

Today we're featuring a first-person essay by Kun Lyna "K" Tauch, who wrote his first story for College Inside while he was still locked up. Since then, he's gotten out, gone back into prison to graduate with his California State University Los Angeles cohort, and started building a new life as a volunteer through California Justice Leaders, a partnership between AmeriCorps and the nonprofit Impact Justice aimed at supporting formerly incarcerated adults. Now he reflects on the federal program that he says gave him a pathway to a career—and the uncertainty of its future.

As he puts it: "When you've spent 18 years learning to be an adult in prison, programs like California Justice Leaders aren't just jobs — they're bridges back to society."

K's experience is part of a broader theme we've been tracking: how federal funding cuts have outsized consequences for formerly incarcerated people. Many of the programs President Donald Trump’s administration has eliminated or is considering cutting serve that exact demographics that formerly incarcerated people often fall into: low-income students, first-generation students, older adults entering the workforce, and people who need basic literacy and job training.

K described how many of his formerly incarcerated peers had to immediately start looking for other positions when Americorps funding was abruptly cut off in April. As one person we talked to said, they don’t have the luxury of waiting around. Many formerly incarcerated people have families to take care of, or have to keep a job as a condition of their probation or parole.

“I believed that federal funding was stable, and based on that assumption, I made some big decisions for myself,” K wrote. “I rented an apartment and bought a new car.”

The cuts also create trickle-down effects. AmeriCorps slashed $400 million in grant funding this past spring as part of the Trump administration’s cuts. That means there are fewer resources—and people—to serve justice-impacted communities.

As Open Campus local reporter Adam Echelman wrote for our partner CalMatters, the future of the 32-year-old volunteerism agency is unclear. While Congress approved money for the program's next fiscal year starting Aug. 1, the administration hasn't released those funds yet—and Trump's budget proposal eliminates AmeriCorps entirely after 2026.

Other federal programs that benefit incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people are also under threat. Natalie Yahr, one of our pathways reporters at Wisconsin Watch, found that workforce and adult education programs that provide job training and literacy instruction—including programs that educate people incarcerated in prisons and jails—are losing funding. The Trump administration froze $715 million in adult education funds nationwide, threatening programs that help adults complete high school, learn English, and improve their literacy skills.

Christi Tilson (seated) receives assistance from her supervisor, Carla James, on May 7, 2025, at John Boner Neighborhood Center in Indianapolis. Tilson is a participant in a free job training program from Goodwill of Central and Southern Indiana for adults ages 55 and older. Credit: Richard Sitler for Mirror Indy

Similarly, Claire Rafford, our reporter at Mirror Indy, explored the impact of eliminating the federal Senior Community Service Employment Program, which helps low-income adults over 55 learn job skills through digital literacy training and career coaching. In Indiana alone, the program serves 31 counties, and uncertainty over funding has already forced the state workforce development department to tell some workers not to report to their job sites while waiting for already-approved federal money.

Program participants include Christi Tilson, who was 60 when she got out of prison after serving four years. The program helped her gain digital literacy skills and find employment. "I was 60, coming out into the world with nothing," she told Claire. "I had to figure out how to live in recovery."

The senior employment initiative and other adult education programs are among dozens of federally funded programs the Trump administration wants to get rid of in an effort to curb what it sees as wasteful government spending.

At the end of June, Jason Gonzales, our reporter at Chalkbeat Colorado, also reported that Trump's budget proposal would also eliminate all funding for TRIO programs, which serve 870,000 high school and college students nationwide from low-income backgrounds, students with disabilities, and first-generation students. TRIO is a resource that many formerly incarcerated students benefit from, as they often fall into one or more of these groups.

But there's one bright spot. Buried in the mammoth legislation that Congress passed in early July is something that might benefit formerly incarcerated people in the future: Workforce Pell grants. These new grants let people use federal aid for short-term job training programs—8 to 14 weeks instead of traditional two-year degrees. People who have already earned a bachelor’s degree are also eligible.

"When you're coming out of jail, you don't have two years," Roger Stanford, president of Western Technical College in Wisconsin, told Natalie for Wisconsin Watch. "If we could turn around and say, 'We can take you right from the jail and give you 10 weeks and put you into a job that has life-sustaining wages,’ that helps (lower) recidivism.”

Read K’s full essay here.

Let’s connect

Interested in reaching people who care about higher education in prisons? Get in touch at sales@opencampusmedia.org or request our media kit.

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Students find belonging in a Michigan prison

Charlotte West — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 23:33:07 +0000

A biweekly newsletter about the future of postsecondary education in prisons. Written by Open Campus national reporter Charlotte West.

Short on time? Here are the highlights:

Artist Alvin Smith worked together with his fellow students in the Hope-Western Prison Education Program in Michigan to put together this series of reflections on what it meant to see the college community embracing its students upon release. Congratulations to Alvin and eight other men who graduated last month as part of Hope-Western’s first bachelor’s cohort!
Check out the Q1 print edition of College Inside that we distribute inside to 1500 incarcerated readers across the country.
It’s conference planning season again. System-impacted people can submit session proposals for the annual Rise Up Conference (Sept. 8-9) until July 18. The Alliance for Higher Education in Prison is also accepting session proposals for the virtual Incarcerated Scholars Conference (Oct. 21-22) until July 15.
ICYMI: We teamed up with the Prisoncast! team at our partner WBEZ Chicago to offer a rare glimpse into the opaque bureaucracy of the prison education waitlist.

What it means to belong to a college community

The first cohort of the Hope-Western Prison Education Program graduated at the end of June 2025. Photo courtesy of the Michigan Department of Corrections.

Late last year, Joe Cedillo and Richard Nelson stepped out of the gates of Muskegon Correctional Facility in Michigan after a combined 63 years of incarceration.

Their freedom not only meant something to them, it also inspired their fellow students in the joint bachelor’s program that Hope College and Western Theological Seminary offer at the prison. The two faith-based colleges partner to provide a liberal arts education to 76 men — including nine who graduated at the end of June — incarcerated at Muskegon.

What moved these students most wasn’t just seeing their classmates walking through the gates — it was witnessing, in photographs, college faculty and staff waiting in the parking lot to welcome them home. Artist and writer Alvin Smith, who was among last month’s graduates and a frequent contributor to College Inside, worked with his fellow students to put together this collection of reflections on that transformative moment.

Read the full story here.

“For the first time in a very long time, you trusted.”

“Untitled.” Oil on canvas by Alvin Smith, 2024.

Imagine a life where the only people you trust look and think like you, and live on the same block in the neighborhood where you grew up. Imagine that anyone who doesn’t resemble you gets met with disdain.

This icy way of viewing outsiders didn’t start with you. Think back to the adults in your life, the way they vehemently distrusted anyone they didn’t know, especially those who looked different. Remember answering the knock on the door and informing the social worker, the insurance agent, the police officer: “My parents ain’t home.”

You carried that distrust into school, leaving the teacher to wonder why they couldn’t reach you. Meanwhile, the people you did feel safe to trust were forced to live less than stellar lives; they had their own issues with trust. You followed their example. You got in trouble. Before long, you ended up with a probation officer, whom you also distrusted. Your cold distrust, their impatience: the combination rendered them ineffective at preventing your unnatural trajectory to prison.

Once behind bars, you found even less incentive to trust anyone outside of your circle. Hopelessness set in. The ice thickened.

Then something happened. You were invited to participate in a seminary program inside your prison, alongside a motley crew of other mistrustful men. You were suspicious of the program organizers, of course you were. Soon the truth of who these people were would show through, you thought. They can’t be who and what they say they are. And who provides a quality education without strings attached?

But a phrase they kept repeating stuck in your mind: “We are here for you.” We kept hearing it again and again in the classroom, and in our interactions with staff.

Soon enough, a miracle occurred. Two of your classmates were granted parole after being incarcerated for 25 and 38 years, respectively. Both were initially given life sentences. You saw the pictures of both of them out in the parking lot with their families. The ice began to thaw.

You were moved by their accomplishment: They had become members of the seminary program, that special community. In the pictures, those men were surrounded by directors, professors, student advisors, administrators and others who welcomed your brothers back into society just as they said they would.

Your defenses continued to melt — and not just yours, but other students in the program. The melting is a kind of freedom. It allowed you and your peers to commit fully to the education process. You knew you were not alone. For the first time in a very long time, you trusted.

— Alvin Smith

Let’s connect

Interested in reaching people who care about higher education in prisons? Get in touch at sales@opencampusmedia.org or request our media kit.

What did you think of this issue?

A look (and listen) inside the dreaded prison education waitlist

Charlotte West — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 15:50:56 +0000

A biweekly newsletter about the intersection of higher education and criminal justice. Written by Open Campus national reporter Charlotte West.

Short on time? Here are the highlights:

Listen to my audio collab with Juan Hernandez about his 18-year struggle to earn his GED in Illinois, produced by our local partner WBEZ.
We’re extending the deadline for responses to our College Inside survey about people’s experiences with college and career during reentry — and the information they get about those things — until July 3. If you are formerly incarcerated, please take a few minutes and fill it out.

One Illinois man’s 18-year journey to get his GED

Juan Hernandez spent more than half of his life inside the Illinois Department of Corrections fighting to get his GED. Documents provided by Juan Hernandez. Collage by Emily Jenkins for Open Campus.

Listen to the audio story over at WBEZ.

Juan Hernandez was a teenager when he was sentenced to prison. He was 32 when he finally completed his high school education.

The nearly two decades in between tell a story of bureaucratic barriers, arbitrary rules, and one man’s refusal to give up on earning his education.

It’s not unusual for people locked up in the Illinois Department of Corrections to wait years to get into programming, such as GED or college classes. That’s especially true for people serving long sentences for serious crimes, as the state prioritizes enrollment for people who will be released from prison sooner. Hernandez was sentenced to 45 years as a teenager.

But what makes Hernandez’s story unique is the paper trail he kept throughout his fight — the letters he wrote to prison officials asking for access to education, and the responses he received. The documents, which he asked a friend to post on Instagram, offer a rare window into the often-opaque process of prison education waitlists that keep thousands of incarcerated people from accessing education inside.

Juan Hernandez wrestled with the Illinois prison system’s bureaucracy for years to try and earn his high school equivalency. Juan Hernandez/Open Campus

“I realized education might be a way forward when the administration was adamant in keeping it from me,” Hernandez wrote to WBEZ and Open Campus from Dixon Correctional Center, where he’s currently locked up. At one prison, Juan wrote that he was assigned to a cell house with 1,000 other men — all of whom were barred from education simply because of where they lived.

Officials called the policy only to allow certain units access to classes “an administrative decision” with no further explanation. When he filed a formal prisoner complaint with IDOC — known as a grievance — a prison officer found his complaint “moot.”

When letters and grievances failed to get him access to education, Hernandez escalated to a hunger strike — one of the drastic steps some incarcerated people turn to when other avenues are exhausted. That ended with prison staff attempting to force-feed him, he wrote. He was eventually transferred to a different prison, where the education administrator told him his test scores helped his case – but his release date did not.

The administrator also warned him: “Do NOT go to SEG!” — shorthand for administrative segregation, otherwise known as “the hole,” which is similar to solitary confinement used as punishment for people in prison who get into trouble. Months later, Hernandez was finally enrolled in GED classes and, true to a promise he made in one of his letters, passed the test on his first attempt.

It’s been seven years since then. Hernandez is still waiting to get into college.

Editor’s note: In a statement, an Illinois Department of Corrections spokeswoman said increased educational staffing since 2018 has allowed more people in prison to complete the GED program, and that wait times have “decreased significantly.” The average wait time to get into GED classes is less than three months, she said.

Let’s connect

Interested in reaching people who care about higher education in prisons? Get in touch at sales@opencampusmedia.org or request our media kit.

What did you think of this issue?

College Inside wants to hear from you

Charlotte West — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 20:14:29 +0000

A biweekly newsletter about the intersection of higher education and criminal justice. Written by Open Campus national reporter Charlotte West.

Happy Friday! This is a little different than our normal College Inside emails, but I wanted to send a quick note on this Friday the 13th about some updates here at Open Campus.

I want to remind our subscribers that our survey on college and career during reentry closes on Monday, June 16. If you are formerly incarcerated, please take a few minutes to fill it out. We want to hear directly from you about your experiences with education and training inside, as well as with navigating college and the labor market after you came home. This survey will help inform our coverage and content in the future as we try to help close the information gap for incarcerated readers.

I’ve had several folks ask me if system-impacted folks were involved with the survey design. The answer is yes. We are working with Jobs for the Future’s Center for Justice & Economic Advancement on this project, and they have a currently incarcerated employee who reviewed the questions before we launched the survey. The need to hear directly from people with lived experience is exactly why we are sending doing this. We are hoping it will be a first step towards creating more avenues for readers.

If you are an administrator, educator, or correctional official, we would also like to hear from you about how federal policies are impacting your prison education programs. We’re carefully tracking issues such as the cuts to Americorps funding and the proposal to restrict part-time Pell enrollment, which would have a disproportionate impact on incarcerated students. While the latter seems to be on pause for now, things change rapidly in our nation’s capital. Please reach out!

In other news, we also sent out the latest print issue of College Inside to over 1,000 incarcerated readers earlier this week. Thousands more will be able to access it on Edovo. This issue features two stories by reporters in our local reporting network. The cover story is Maddy Franklin's piece for PublicSource about "Hamlet" at Allegheny County Jail. This issue also includes Sneha Dey's reporting for The Texas Tribune on Lee College's reentry preparation program in Texas prisons. Other content includes my stories about cultural education in Oregon and Hawaii, the suspension of Auburn University's bachelor's program, as well as a profile of an Illinois man studying for a law degree from behind bars in Minnesota. If you are a prison educator or librarian, please download the PDF to share with your students and patrons.

Finally, tune into WBEZ’s Prisoncast! this Sunday, June 15 from 2-4pm Central for a special broadcast airing on public radio stations across Illinois and online at WBEZ.org. It’s a radio show made with and for people affected by incarceration in Illinois. I’m really excited that a story we’ve been working on for months will finally hit the airwaves. Because of one man’s meticulous paper trail, I’ll take you inside the bureaucratic nightmare of education waiting lists. Learn more at WBEZ.org/prisoncast.

We hope to hear from you!

Thanks for your support.

Charlotte West

P.S. In case you missed it, check out my latest story on how San Francisco State University is educating its campus and community about the realities of reentry.

Let’s connect

Interested in reaching people who care about higher education in prisons? Get in touch at sales@opencampusmedia.org or request our media kit.

Educating the campus and community about life after prison

Charlotte West — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 21:53:22 +0000

A biweekly newsletter about the intersection of higher education and criminal justice. Written by Open Campus national reporter Charlotte West.

Short on time? Here what you need to know:

Earlier this spring, San Francisco State University hosted a reentry simulation designed to educate the campus and community about life after prison.
An agriculture program at Merced College in California unexpectedly benefitted formerly incarcerated students, reports Open Campus rural education reporter Nick Fouriezos.
We want to hear about your experience with college and career during reentry. Due to an overwhelming response we got to a LinkedIn post, we’ve made this survey to help inform future coverage in this newsletter. Please take a few minutes to share your insights! The survey closes Monday, June 16.
If you’re in Illinois, tune into WBEZ’s Prisoncast! this Sunday, from 2-4pm Central, airing on public radio stations across the state and at WBEZ.org. It’s a radio show made with and for people affected by incarceration in Illinois. I’ve been working with the team there on a story that provides a unique insight into the bureaucratic nightmare of education waiting lists. Learn more at WBEZ.org/prisoncast.
ICYMI: Check out Part 1 and Part 2 of an extended Q&A with Erik Maloney, a lifer in Arizona, and Kevin Wright, a criminal justice professor at . They co-authored Imprisoned Minds, a book about trauma and healing published in December 2024.

How San Francisco State is educating its students — and the community — about life after prison

Kianna Brabow, a chemistry major at San Francisco State University, participated in a reentry simulation designed to educate the campus and community about the challenges faced by people coming out of prison. Charlotte West/Open Campus

When Joseph Close got out of prison earlier this year, he hoped his probation officer would be there to help him. The support he received from the state came in the form of two $10 Target gift cards.

Close’s release was sudden, to a city in Southern California where he knew no one. If it wasn’t for his connections with nonprofit organizations assisting people getting out of prison, he might have been on the street. “I had nothing but clothes on my back, a bar of soap, and deodorant,” he said. “I had no support.”

Earlier this spring, Close shared his story at a reentry simulation at San Francisco State University. The event was organized by Project Rebound, a support program for formerly incarcerated students. The goal was to educate students and the public about the challenges people like Close face when rebuilding their lives after prison.

Those challenges range from housing, employment, and day-to-day tasks like using an ATM to navigating the bureaucracy of probation and parole. But this wasn’t just a theoretical exercise — it was part of the program’s efforts to reshape how the community thinks about the criminal justice system.

Educating the community

Project Rebound, a support program for formerly incarcerated students, started at San Francisco State University in 1967. Charlotte West/Open Campus

The 70 participants in the event, which was open to the public, included San Francisco State students, recent law school graduates, people who have incarcerated family members, and even prison officials. The diversity reflected the event’s goal of educating those who had little — or only a theoretical understanding — of what reentry actually entails.

As they entered the room, participants received packets containing character assignments, fake money and a laundry list of requirements that included tasks such as obtaining IDs and attending court-mandated treatment — everything they’d need to do over four simulated weeks. Tables lining the edge of the room were staffed by volunteers assuming roles such as “probation officer” and “career counselor.” A large hand-written “Jail” sign was taped up on one wall — representing the more than 60% of people released from jail or prison who eventually go back.

A facilitator explained the process and purpose to an attentive audience. “This simulation is not a game. It’s a reflection of very real barriers, frustration, and emotional toll that people face every single day when trying to rebuild their lives after prison,” she said.

Read the rest of the story.

A second chance through farming

John Pressell (left) and his Merced AgTEC instructor Karl Montague. Photo: Nick Fouriezos

John Pressell has been incarcerated for half his life, with intermittent stints that began when he dropped out of high school in 11th grade.

“I used to always look at education like, ‘Oh, I don’t need it,’” the 44-year-old says. As a teen, John felt like he was making plenty of money on the streets while living what he describes as “a criminal life.”

Two years ago, everything changed. After being released following a decade in state prison, John connected with Reform Merced, a California nonprofit that helps formerly incarcerated individuals rebuild their lives.

They placed him at their recently opened organic farm, where he now tends bell peppers, tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, and seasonal crops.

“I enjoy working out around the field, I enjoy driving the tractor and I enjoy planting food,” John says. “It’s something that can actually stay with me in the future. Something to be proud of, where I can see people go to a grocery store, and think, ‘look, I grew that.’”

Merced College is one of six community colleges that have received $42 million in state and federal grants to create free competency-based programs for agricultural technologies across California’s Central Valley.

“When we first thought about this program, it was designed traditionally for the more traditional farm laborer and upscaling them for the workforce,” says Cody Jacobson, Merced’s director of ag innovation.

However, John represents somebody program leaders didn’t initially anticipate.

He’s one of a dozen or so formerly incarcerated students from Restore Merced who’ve enrolled in the AgTEC program, which allows students to work at their own pace through 14 skill areas, from digital literacy to equipment operation.

The partnership emerged when Restore Merced’s director reached out to explore educational opportunities for their workers, and it’s flourished since.

“It turns out that what they’re doing with Restore Merced is a great fit for what we’re doing. And these individuals who are trying to get their lives back on track, they’re eager to learn,” Jacobson said.

Read the rest of the story by Open Campus rural education reporter Nick Fouriezos in his Mile Markers newsletter.

We want to hear from you!

If you are formerly incarcerated, please take a few moments to fill out this survey about your experience with college and career during reentry. What do you wish you had known? What were the most important sources of information about education and work when you came home? This will help inform our future coverage and content in College Inside. The survey closes June 16.

Let’s connect

Interested in reaching people who care about higher education in prisons? Get in touch at sales@opencampusmedia.org or request our media kit.

Know others that are interested in higher ed in prisons? Let them know about the newsletter. Thanks!

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Lost boys, trapped men, and the role of lifers in prison education

Charlotte West — Tue, 27 May 2025 21:52:51 +0000

A biweekly newsletter about the intersection of higher education and criminal justice. Written by Open Campus national reporter Charlotte West.

Short on time? Here’s what you need to know:

This week, we’re publishing Part 2 of a Q&A with Erik Maloney, a lifer in Arizona, and Kevin Wright, a criminal justice professor at Arizona State University. They co-authored Imprisoned Minds, a book about trauma and healing published in December 2024, over the course of seven years. Check out Part 1 of the Q&A.
Lisa Kurian Philip, our local reporter with WBEZ Chicago, visited Cook County Jail to sit in on a book club hosting famed anti-death penalty activist Sister Helen Prejean. Sister Helen was celebrating her 86th birthday. Listen here.
We want to hear about your experience with college and career during reentry. Due to an overwhelming response we got to a LinkedIn post, we’ve made this survey to help inform future coverage in this newsletter. Please take a few minutes to share your insights! The survey closes Monday, June 16.

“Some guys don't want degrees—they want to help kids or their family.”

Erik Maloney and Kevin Wright. Courtesy Kevin Wright.

In the last issue of College Inside, we published Part 1 of a Q&A with Kevin Wright, a criminal justice professor who directs the Center for Correctional Solutions at Arizona State University, and Erik Maloney, who is serving a life sentence in the Arizona Department of Corrections. Together they wrote a book, Imprisoned Minds: Lost Boys, Trapped Men, and Solutions from Within the Prison, which was published in December 2024. They met in a prison classroom in 2016, and over the course of the next seven years worked on what eventually became a book focused on helping people in prison overcome trauma. There was so much good stuff in the interview that we had to share the rest of it with you. Wright and Maloney discuss trauma-informed teaching, the role of lifers in education, and what’s next.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Charlotte West: Kevin, as someone who teaches in prisons, what does it mean to have a trauma-informed approach in the classroom?

Kevin Wright: I often feel uncomfortable with some of the workshops and classes that we do on the inside, because we create activities and experiences that challenge people to think about their past and usually bring up some tough stuff. Then we leave, and they may or may not have support.

One example: in one of the Inside-Out classes in the women's prison, we had students engage in a debate, arguing for the opposite side of something they believed in. One of our more vocal inside students was quiet the whole time. When I asked if she was okay, she said, ‘When people started arguing, I felt like I was back at home with my parents. And then it reminded me of my trial, where people were arguing about my future and I didn't have a say in it.’ We would never think that a debate might be triggering to someone. So trauma-informed teaching is about understanding what people have gone through, seeing it through their eyes.

West: Erik, you've developed a curriculum based on the ‘imprisoned mind’ concept, which focuses on helping people deal with childhood trauma. Can you talk more about that?

Erik Maloney: My class is called "Conquering Imprisoned Minds." I teach introspective techniques using writing as a therapeutic coping mechanism. I've adapted concepts from psychology to make them more understandable to the prison population, taking out all the academic jargon.

The main thing I'm proud of is what I call a ‘trauma timeline’—just a straight line on paper from birth to present with the definition of trauma at the top. I ask each student to think about anything that happened in their life using this definition of trauma, put a hash mark, and briefly write what happened and at what age. Then I ask them to write a paragraph telling what happened, who did it, and how it made them feel. From there, I introduce methods for developing empathy, forgiveness, and resilience techniques.

West: The fact that you created your own curriculum to accompany the book makes me think about the role of lifers in creating educational opportunities in prisons. What do you see as the role of lifers in filling some of these gaps?

Maloney: I've said for years that lifers are so underutilized in prison. It's all about punishment for what you're in for, and [the prison system] overlooks us as a resource. We are people who, if allowed to be educated properly, can teach courses indefinitely while also being a role model for those with shorter sentences. This gives the lifer meaning and purpose to do good again. He serves as a mentor, whether he likes it or not, to [those] people coming into the prisons. When they see him doing well, it inspires others to want to do well.

But if it's all about punishment, and a person has no meaning and no purpose in life, then all they have is hopelessness. With hopelessness comes despair, and with despair, you have rampant drug and alcohol abuse in prison, and violence stems from that.

West: Are you training other facilitators to be able to teach the course?

Maloney: I'm really excited about the direction my class is taking. The next one will be an all-Native American class. Right now my facilitator's manual is also being translated into Spanish so we can hold a class for [people] who don't speak English. I already have someone willing to facilitate it for me.

West: You were only able to work with incarcerated men in developing this concept. Do you think the ‘imprisoned minds’ framework applies to women's prisons as well?

Wright: We actually took a segment of the book into our Inside-Out class with incarcerated women this semester to get their feedback. I was nervous about how they would respond, but the reaction was immediate and unanimous—they absolutely felt this applied to their experiences. While the specific traumas and responses might manifest differently, the fundamental concept of childhood trauma creating irrational mindsets resonated strongly.

What was particularly interesting was how they connected it to relationship patterns. Many of the women discussed how their past trauma affected their ability to form healthy relationships, often leading to situations that contributed to their incarceration. That's consistent with what we know about pathways to incarceration for women, which often involve relationships with partners engaged in criminal activity.

Maloney: My hope is that women who connect with these concepts might develop their own version of the curriculum that speaks directly to their experiences. Trauma is universal, but how we experience and process it can be very different.

“Imprisoned Minds: Lost Boys, Trapped Men and Solutions from Within the Prison” is a new book co-authored by Arizona State University Professor Kevin Wright and Erik S. Maloney, who is serving a life sentence in Arizona. Photo by Charlie Leight/ASU News

West: I've also been thinking a lot about the different ways universities intersect with prisons beyond formal degree programs and classes. An Inside-Out class led to this scholarly collaboration between you two, but it also seems like many different parts of Arizona State have gotten involved with the criminal justice system.

Wright: When COVID hit and everything shut down, it was actually a good moment for us institutionally to push pause and reflect. I was thinking about our charter at ASU, which says in part, ‘We measure ourselves by whom we include rather than whom we exclude.’ When we approach people on the inside as people capable of good rather than simply criminals, it becomes a social problem we can bring social solutions to.

We see connections across all disciplines of the university that we can bring inside. For example, we took our interior design school—the faculty and students—into a facility to redo a classroom so that it's trauma-informed, and we did it alongside the people that are there. Now we've got this room in the women's prison that has a beautiful mural, carpeting to keep the sound down, and colors that are trauma-informed. It's a totally different space.

We're also bringing in art programming, English writing workshops, and other initiatives. I know higher education in prisons is the sexy thing, but it's not for everybody. A lot of people had tough experiences in school or don't even have a GED. It became almost uncomfortable that [higher education] was the only thing we were pushing. There are many different opportunities to invest in people on the inside.

Maloney: One of the things I teach in my class is what comes after the imprisoned mind. The last three lessons focus on pursuing redemption for the harms we've caused in an altruistic way—giving of oneself. I help people discover methods that fit that definition, and often it's learning something that can be of value to someone else and positively impact their lives. You don't need a degree for that. Some guys don't want degrees—they want to help kids or their family. I help them flesh that out and seek redemption, which gives them meaning and purpose while incarcerated, and goals for after their incarceration.

West: What's next for this project now that the book is published?

Maloney: Getting the book published was one challenge, but the real work is just beginning—taking these concepts and turning them into practical tools that can help people overcome their imprisoned minds. That's where our focus is now – developing methods that work in the real world of prison education and beyond.

Wright: What started as a class assignment seven years ago has grown into something that could transform how we approach rehabilitation in correctional facilities across the country.

Read Part 1 of this Q&A.

We want to hear from you!

If you are formerly incarcerated, please take a few moments to fill out this survey about your experience with college and career during reentry. What do you wish you had known? What were the most important sources of information about education and work when you came home? Let us know! This will help inform our future coverage and content in College Inside. The survey closes June 16.

Let’s connect

Interested in reaching people who care about higher education in prisons? Get in touch at sales@opencampusmedia.org or request our media kit.

Know others that are interested in higher ed in prisons? Let them know about the newsletter. Thanks!

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Solutions that come from inside prison walls

Charlotte West — Fri, 09 May 2025 20:53:55 +0000

A biweekly newsletter about the intersection of higher education and criminal justice. Written by Open Campus national reporter Charlotte West.

Short on time? Here are the highlights:

This week, we’re publishing Part 1 of a Q&A with Erik Maloney, a lifer in Arizona, and Kevin Wright, a criminal justice professor at Arizona State University. Over the course of seven years they co-authored Imprisoned Minds, a book about trauma and healing in prison that was published in December 2024.
We want to hear about your experience with college and career during reentry. Due to an overwhelming response we got to a LinkedIn post, we’ve made this survey to help inform future coverage in this newsletter. If you are formerly incarcerated, please take a few minutes to share your insights!
The Stillwater Awards, which recognize excellence in prison journalism, awarded College Inside contributor Juan Hernandez first place for Best Illustration.
In a recent blog post, Ess Pokornowski and Tommaso Bardelli of ITHAKA S+R dig into how New York's recent 22-day prison guard strike in February severely disrupted higher education programs for incarcerated students. Their article highlights systemic vulnerabilities in prison education and threats to students' Pell Grant eligibility even after the strike's official end.
ICYMI: Ron Palm, an incarcerated man who recently transferred from Illinois to Minnesota, is one of just a few incarcerated students in the country studying law behind bars. Co-published with our local partner, WBEZ Chicago.

A new book explores trauma inside and outside prison — and how to address it

A new book, Imprisoned Minds: Lost Boys, Trapped Men, and Solutions from Within the Prison, published in December 2024, represents an unusual academic partnership between someone who studies the criminal justice system and someone who lives within it. The book is a collaboration between Erik Maloney, who is serving a life sentence in the Arizona Department of Corrections, and Kevin Wright, a criminal justice professor who directs the Center for Correctional Solutions at Arizona State University.

The two met in 2016 when Maloney participated in an Inside-Out class that Wright taught at the prison that brought in outside undergraduates. The book was the result of a seven-year process that involved Maloney transcribing interviews and writing chapters by hand, Wright providing edits, and lengthy written exchanges about which stories to include and how to structure the work.

For the book, Maloney interviewed over 20 men he’s incarcerated with, ultimately selecting six whose stories best illustrated "imprisoned minds" — the book’s central concept that explains how childhood trauma creates patterns of self-destructive thinking and behavior that can lead to incarceration.

"The real epidemic in this country is not drugs and alcohol or violence. Those are symptoms of a bigger problem — the real epidemic is untreated childhood trauma," explains Maloney. This insight forms the foundation of Maloney and Wright’s collaboration, which aims to make complex psychological concepts accessible to both those with "an eighth grade education and someone with a PhD."

In Part 1 of this interview, Charlotte West talks to Maloney and Wright about their aim to address trauma behind bars and how they collaborated across prison walls.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. We’ll be publishing Part 2 of this interview in the next issue of College Inside.

Arizona State University Professor Kevin Wright and Erik S. Maloney, who is serving a life sentence in Arizona, at their book launch in January at Red Rock Correctional Center in Eloy, Arizona. Photo by Charlie Leight/ASU News.

Charlotte West: Can you define the concept of “imprisoned minds” and how incarcerated people can overcome it?

Erik Maloney: An imprisoned mind is an irrational mindset that develops from untreated childhood trauma and is enhanced by drug or alcohol abuse or risky behavior. The irrational mindset is the flawed decision making ability that is void of logic and reasoning, where critical thinking is influenced by a hyperfocus on satisfying immediate desires.

How to overcome it? It's a long process. You cannot overcome the imprisoned mind without confronting your past, and then beginning to develop yourself in the present.

Kevin Wright: It was important for us to include "Lost Boys and Trapped Men" in the book’s subtitle to make that connection for people. Society often feels sympathy for children who've experienced trauma, but when that same child becomes a 40-year-old man, that connection is gone. People don't think about how childhood experiences set someone on a destructive pathway. We wanted to emphasize that men in prison once were those boys who experienced trauma, making that link that's often missing in both public perception and academic research.

West: Most academic books about trauma and criminal behavior are written by outside researchers. How does Erik’s insider perspective change the narrative?

Maloney: When you read psychology books talking about trauma, they very vaguely allude to guys who experience trauma as children growing up with irrational minds, but that's as far as they go. These neuroscientists will give you scans of the brain and show you how it lights up when it's not supposed to or doesn't light up when it's supposed to. They show that there's a dysfunction going on in the emotional part of the brain, but they don’t tell you what it looks like. As they're talking about [all] this, I clearly understood what they meant, because I lived it. I had that irrational mindset. I thought, how cool it would be to actually demonstrate to the people who are writing these books what the irrational mindset looks like?

Wright: This book is about people and their stories. So often as criminologists, we just take all the people, all their characteristics, all their bad and their good out of the story, and they become data. It's this very antiseptic writing that just isn't in touch with people. We're also hopeful that this will make its way into correctional training academies and into correctional leadership spaces.

West: I'm curious about the actual writing process for this book, given the constraints of working across prison walls. What did that collaboration look like day-to-day?

Maloney: The writing process was challenging. Each chapter was written by hand with pencil because when I first tried using pen, there were so many mistakes that the pages looked horrible. Once I completed a chapter, I'd give it to Kevin. He would make a photocopy and edit it, then return both the original and the edited copy to me. I would rewrite it in pen and give it back to him. He would have someone type it up, and then I'd move on to the next chapter.

For the interviews, I had to be careful about privacy. We don't have a room to lock ourselves in, so I worried about eavesdroppers overhearing personal histories. I'd find places with enough privacy, conduct the interviews, and take notes by hand. The whole process for each person took about two and a half days, assuming there weren't any lockdowns. Some guys had repressed memories, and I would ask probing questions to help them recall details. Sometimes they had to call family members to clarify what happened during certain periods.

Wright: What's remarkable is that most of our collaboration happened through written correspondence. We couldn't just hop on a call or send a quick email. We exchanged lengthy letters about the concept, which stories to include, and how to structure everything. I'd read my responses multiple times before sending them to make sure I was clear. When we disagreed on something, we had to work through it carefully in writing. It was like people did for centuries before modern technology — there's something pure about exchanging ideas that way.

The publication process was another challenge. We faced a lot of rejection, and it was tough to tell Erik we got another ‘no’ after months of waiting. Academic publishing moves slowly, with review processes and revisions, and explaining all that through our limited communication channels tested our patience. But we persisted.

Kevin Wright and Erik Maloney. Photo by Charlie Leight/ASU News

West: Now that the book is out there in the world, what kind of response have you been getting?

Wright: What's been most gratifying is seeing the book reach people we never expected. We've had school teachers reading it and saying, ‘These are our kids. We see these traumatized children in our classrooms every day.’ That recognition — that these patterns start early and could be addressed before incarceration — that's exactly the connection we were hoping to make.

West: Erik, what has this project meant to you personally?

Maloney: This book gave me a chance to turn my own painful experiences into something that might help others. When you're serving life, finding meaning becomes essential. Through this work, I've been able to show that lifers aren't just people to be warehoused — we can contribute valuable insights precisely because of what we've lived through. That's the greatest achievement of this project: proving that solutions can come from within the prison walls.

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How one Illinois man is studying to be a lawyer – from inside a Minnesota prison

Charlotte West — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 23:13:24 +0000

A biweekly newsletter about the intersection of higher education and criminal justice. Written by Open Campus national reporter Charlotte West.

Short on time? Here are the highlights:

This week we’re featuring a story about Ron Palm, an incarcerated man who transferred from Illinois to Minnesota to attend Mitchell Hamline School of Law. He’s one of just a few incarcerated students in the country studying law behind bars. The story will be copublished with our local partner, WBEZ Chicago.
ICYMI: After the Alabama Department of Corrections banned key staff members from correctional facilities due to alleged security concerns in August, Auburn University suspended its credit-bearing college classes inside, effectively shutting down Alabama’s only prison bachelor's degree program.

Transfer to Minnesota opens path to law school for Illinois prisoner

Ronald Palm with a brochure from Mitchell Hamline School of Law in Minnesota.

For most incarcerated students, a transfer between prisons means disrupted education and even abandoned degrees.

But for Ronald Palm, a transfer from the Illinois Department of Corrections to Minnesota meant just the opposite: an unprecedented opportunity to attend law school while he was still locked up.

Palm, who was sentenced to 30 years at the age of 17, now attends Mitchell Hamline School of Law remotely from a prison in Faribault, Minnesota, about an hour south of Minneapolis. He is among a small group of incarcerated scholars pursuing law degrees at Mitchell Hamline, which says it’s the first law school in the country to allow students to study from prison.

Palm started his college education at Danville Correctional Center, through the Education Justice Project at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He graduated summa cum laude from Eastern Illinois University in 2023 before his transfer to Minnesota last summer to join the Prison to Law Pipeline initiative launched by Minneapolis-based nonprofit law firm the Legal Revolution.

Palm found out about the program after he contacted the national organization that administers the LSAT about taking the exam while he was still in prison. He didn’t know about the Legal Revolution – or the possibility of actually attending law school while still incarcerated – until someone at the council forwarded his letter to the organization, he told Open Campus. His transfer to Minnesota was contingent on him being accepted to Mitchell Hamline.

The Legal Revolution sent him study materials, he said, but the hardest part of the process was studying for the LSAT in the chaotic prison environment. He sought refuge by studying in the Education Justice Project’s library at Danville. The program’s tutors also helped him study for the LSAT and review his practice exams.

Since Palm started law school, several more students at Danville have expressed interest in taking the LSAT or GRE, said Andrea Miller, a psychology professor at UIUC who volunteers with the Education Justice Project at the prison. As a result, the program is developing a summer reading group that focuses on identifying career interests and preparing incarcerated men for law school and graduate school.

Maureen Onyelobi was one of the first two students to attend Mitchell Hamline School of Law from behind bars. The law school is likely the first in the country to admit incarcerated students.

The law program at Mitchell Hamline began in 2022 when the American Bar Association granted the law school permission to allow students to attend classes virtually. Maureen Onyelobi and Jeff Young were the program’s first two students. “It’s so fitting that someone who’s actually been incarcerated and who could actually relate to what their clients are going through can actually earn a law degree,” Onyelobi told Open Campus right after she found out she had been accepted to Mitchell Hamline.

Onyelobi's legal education likely played a role in a 2023 decision by the Minnesota parole board to reduce her sentence from life without parole to life with the possibility of parole, the Minnesota Star Tribune reported.

The program also works with North Hennepin Community College, located outside of Minneapolis, to offer a paralegal certificate to incarcerated students.

Palm is now in his second semester. He has a tablet that allows him to conduct legal research and to email professors with questions, and he studies via Zoom in real time alongside law students who are on campus in Minneapolis. He recently presented his first oral arguments for his legal writing class, while his classmates stood at a lectern at the front of the classroom.

"It is like I have a seat in class, only I'm on the screen," he said.

The Legal Revolution covers his tuition, with Mitchell Hamline also providing a scholarship, Palm said. This summer, he will participate in an externship focused on pardons and commutations with the law firm.

"I am excited to get some actual practice under my belt," Palm said.

The Legal Revolution also works in partnership with the Law School Admission Council to administer LSAT exams in prisons across multiple states, with 16 students in Minnesota, Illinois, North Carolina, Louisiana, Connecticut and Florida taking the LSAT over the last academic year.

In recent years, a handful of formerly incarcerated people have started law school in Illinois. Last year, Benard McKinley became the first person in Illinois to take the LSAT from prison. A graduate of the Northwestern Prison Education Program, he’s now a first-year law student at the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law.

Palm, who has served 22 years of his sentence, could be eligible for work release in about five years. At that point, he may be able to take the bar exam, although some states prevent people with criminal histories from becoming attorneys.

In Illinois, people with felony convictions are allowed to take the bar exam, but must first be certified as having “good moral character and fitness to practice law” by a special committee, according to the Illinois Board of Admissions to the Bar. It’s unclear if someone would be allowed to take the bar exam while still in custody.

But Palm remains optimistic about the impact that attorneys who’ve been in prison themselves can have on the legal profession.

"I think we can have a tremendous effect on reforming the justice system," he said. "A lot of the time, we are portrayed as people who are just beyond redemption. But the truth is that some of us just [weren’t] given the chance to excel."

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Auburn University's prison education program ‘indefinitely suspended’

Charlotte West — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 21:10:58 +0000

A biweekly newsletter about the intersection of higher education and criminal justice. Written by Open Campus national reporter Charlotte West.

After the Alabama Department of Corrections banned key staff members from correctional facilities due to alleged security concerns in August, Auburn University suspended its credit-bearing classes, effectively shutting down Alabama’s only bachelor's degree program in prison.
Open Campus and WBEZ Chicago visited a DePaul University Inside-Out class about homelessness at Cook County jail in Chicago. Listen to the audio story.
WBEZ’s Prisoncast! host Erin Allen interviewed me about my year-long coverage of Illinois’ earned time law, including the story of Carl Rogers, who walked out of an Illinois prison in February.
College Inside will be at the National Conference for Higher Education in Prison next week in New Orleans. Check out my session on prison journalism on Thursday, April 10 at 1:15 pm central with Lawrence Bartley of The Marshall Project and Shaheen Pasha of the Prison Journalism Project.
Juan Hernandez in Illinois has been nominated for “Best Illustration” in the second annual Stillwater Awards, which recognize outstanding prison journalism. Sign up to attend the virtual awards ceremony on Thursday, May 8.
ICYMI: We talked to federal Education Department staff affected by last month’s layoffs and other experts about what the Trump administration’s plans to dismantle the agency mean for incarcerated students and borrowers.

Auburn is the second major research university in the South to face challenges with its college program for incarcerated students.

Auburn University campus in Alabama. CRobertson/iStock

Just a few months after Georgia State University announced last spring that it would end its college program for incarcerated students, Auburn University's bachelor’s degree program was suspended indefinitely after the Alabama Department of Corrections barred college staff from entering the state prisons due to alleged security concerns.

The suspension of the Alabama Prison Arts + Education Project – the only bachelor’s program in Alabama’s prison system – means that more than 50 students who have spent years working on their degrees have had to put their education on hold with little information about when and if they’ll be able to finish. Additionally, more than 25,000 men and women incarcerated in Alabama no longer have access to any opportunity to earn an academic degree.

The university has made no public announcements about the suspension of the college program last fall, but internal documents and emails obtained by Open Campus show a pattern of disruptions that had already paused the college program multiple times. Open Campus reached out repeatedly to Auburn and officials declined to comment.

Former staff say the program seemed to be supported by Auburn’s upper administration, including the president and a member of the board of trustees who attended the program’s first bachelor’s graduation in December 2023. Rob Sember, who served as academic coordinator for the program during 2022 and 2023, returned to Auburn for the event.

"The idea … that it would suddenly, within a matter of a few months, just collapse, I found quite startling,” he said.

After the Alabama Department of Corrections banned key staff members from correctional facilities due to alleged security concerns in August, Auburn suspended its credit-bearing classes, effectively shutting down the state's only prison bachelor's degree program. These disruptions came as prison education is expected to expand nationally with the return of Pell Grants for incarcerated students in 2023.

The staff members, who were ultimately dismissed by Auburn, contested the department’s allegations, maintaining they followed established university and corrections department protocols and practices throughout their employment, according to emails obtained by Open Campus.

While the college program is suspended, Auburn has continued to teach its non-credit bearing arts classes at prisons across Alabama.

Prior to the suspension of the program, Auburn also implemented a new admissions policy requiring a "secondary review" for formerly incarcerated students who wanted to study on campus. They were required to submit information about their criminal history to the university to determine whether or not they’d be allowed to enroll.

That was a change from the prior policy, which stated that incarcerated students could "continue their education at any Auburn campus" upon release, according to the 2023-24 student handbook. That document explicitly stated that students who leave due to parole would "still be considered an Auburn University student."

This policy change appears to contradict Auburn's memorandum of understanding with the corrections department, which guaranteed students could "fully transfer and continue their studies at any location of the college after release." The new policy also potentially conflicts with requirements for prison education programs receiving federal financial aid, which mandate that students be able to continue their studies at any college location.

At least two formerly incarcerated students have been unable to continue their education at Auburn.

More than eight months later, neither Auburn nor the Alabama Department of Corrections has offered any timeline for the program's return, leaving students with unanswered questions about whether or not they will be able to complete their degrees.

Students told Open Campus they weren’t given any information about the reason behind the suspension other than that the program had been halted for “logistical reasons.”

Sember has stayed in touch with several students.

"They're devastated, they feel abandoned," Sember said. "The sense is, 'This is Alabama. This is how things work in Alabama: something good happens, and then they take it away from you.'"

Read the full story.

DePaul class inside Cook County jail brings together incarcerated and campus-based students

Students in DePaul’s Inside-Out class discuss homelessness during a class session.Lisa Kurian Philip/WBEZ

A group of students sit in a big circle in the basement of Chicago’s Cook County Jail, listening in rapt attention to DePaul University Professor Jen Kouba. About half wear sand-colored jumpsuits with “DOC” written on the back. The other half are dressed in powder blue t-shirts with “DePaul” written on them.

It’s a typical class session in the Inside-Out program, which brings together campus-based students with incarcerated students for quarter-long courses. Founded in 1997 at Temple University, the program is now taught in hundreds of correctional facilities across the country. DePaul offers at least one of these classes at Cook County jail every quarter.

Only first names are used here, and outside students are told not to look up why their inside classmates are here at the jail. Both groups receive the same college credit from DePaul University.

Today’s focus: homelessness — a topic Kouba finds particularly fitting for this unique classroom.

“There are deeply embedded societal beliefs about unhoused neighbors, just as there are assumptions about people impacted by the carceral system,” says Kouba, an adjunct professor of peace, justice and conflict studies. “And the inside students are the first to acknowledge that they had assumptions about me and the outside DePaul students.”

Read and listen to the rest of the story.

News and views

A new report from Ithaka S+R explores how educational spaces shape teaching and learning inside prisons and offers actionable strategies to improve the design of those spaces for incarcerated learners. It draws on interviews with formerly incarcerated students, corrections officials, higher education in prison program directors, and site visits to five different facilities.

The Institute for College Access & Success published a case study of how leaders in Tennessee have collaborated to create the Tennessee Prison College Coalition, which has expanded and improved postsecondary education for incarcerated students across the state.

The 2024 edition of the Standards for Library Services for the Incarcerated and Detained is available as a downloadable PDF.

The Alliance for Higher Education in Prison published a new report, Education in Action: Exploring Remote Employment & Work-Based Learning During Incarceration. The report is a resource offering guidance for exploring and implementing meaningful remote work-based learning opportunities for incarcerated students.

Let’s connect

Please connect if you have story ideas or just want to share your experience with prison education programs as a student or educator. You can always reach me at charlotte@opencampus.org or on Bluesky, LinkedIn, or Instagram. To reach me via snail mail, you can write to: Open Campus, 2460 17th Avenue #1015, Santa Cruz, CA 95062.

Interested in reaching people who care about higher education in prisons? Get in touch at sales@opencampusmedia.org or request our media kit.

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Department of Education purge leaves incarcerated students in limbo

Charlotte West — Fri, 21 Mar 2025 23:08:30 +0000

A biweekly newsletter about the intersection of higher education and criminal justice. Written by Open Campus national reporter Charlotte West.

Short on time? Here are the highlights:

We talked to federal Education Department staff affected by last week’s layoffs and other experts about what the Trump administration’s plans to dismantle the agency mean for prison education programs as well as incarcerated students and borrowers.
Carl Rogers walked out of an Illinois prison last week more than a year after Open Campus and WBEZ Chicago first featured his story. Rogers was released from prison because of a law that went into effect last year giving sentence credits for work and education, but he believes he served more than he should have.
We are launching a quarterly print issue of College Inside focused on Illinois in collaboration with WBEZ’s Prisoncast! team.

There are more questions than answers about how the Education Department layoffs will affect education in prison

For many incarcerated people, mail is the only option for communication with government agencies. Charlotte West/Open Campus

Somewhere on a desk in the federal Department of Education building in Washington D.C. sits a pile of unopened mail from incarcerated student loan borrowers.

The person responsible for opening them was among the Education Department employees laid off in the past several weeks.

After last week’s purge of nearly half of the Education Department’s workforce, everyone navigating federal financial aid faces challenges — including processing delays, reduced oversight of loan servicers, and diminished customer service. For incarcerated students and borrowers, however, these widespread problems are magnified. They can’t simply pick up a phone to call their loan servicer, check email for updates, or log into online portals.

There are also more questions than answers about how higher education in prison programs will be affected given the unprecedented changes at the Education Department. In July 2023, approximately 700,000 incarcerated students became eligible for Pell Grants when the ban on federal financial aid for people in prison was fully lifted. But the expansion of new programs has been slow even before staff were laid off.

While department officials confirm that new prison education programs have been approved in the weeks since Trump took office, there’s concern that the layoffs will slow the approval process even more and limit support for incarcerated students and borrowers. To further complicate things, President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order which calls on the Secretary of Education to take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Education Department.

“Students in prison are often out of sight, out of mind, and they need advocates at the table when decisions get made about the programs that affect them,” said Ruth Delaney, director of the Vera Institute of Justice’s Unlocking Potential initiative.

Read the rest of the story.

He won a yearlong fight to be released from prison, but says more deserve sentence reductions

Carl Rogers was released from the Illinois prison system in February due to a law that allows incarcerated people to earn sentence reductions by participating in work and education. Photo courtesy of Carl Rogers.

Carl Rogers, whose story Open Campus and WBEZ first reported in April 2024, walked out of Robinson Correctional Center in Illinois on February 14. By his calculations, his release came more than a year later than it should have.

Rogers was released from prison because of a law that went into effect last year giving sentence credits for work and education. He contends he should have been eligible for release in January 2024, when the change took effect. The new program has been beset by bureaucratic failures, and there are still people in Illinois who believe they would be immediately eligible for release if the Illinois Department of Corrections had properly calculated their sentence credits.

Meanwhile, a December 2023 internal report obtained by Open Campus shows the department was aware of the recordkeeping issues that have plagued the new system before the sentence credit law even went into effect. That report estimates it could take until 2029 to digitize all records necessary for proper credit calculations.

Rogers couldn’t wait that long. After Open Campus first reported on his case, Rogers staged a hunger strike, along with other incarcerated individuals at Robinson, to try and force prison officials to review his case and award him the sentence credits. On Valentine’s Day, he was finally released after spending almost 32 years behind bars.

Read the rest of the story.

College Inside and Prisoncast! team up to launch newsletter for people incarcerated in Illinois

College Inside x Prisoncast! newsletter. Design by Emily Jenkins.

I am teaming up with Lauren Frost and Alex Keefe from WBEZ Chicago’s Prisoncast! project to launch a quarterly print newsletter for people incarcerated in Illinois. This collaboration builds on Open Campus's network of higher education reporters working in partnership with 17 local newsrooms across the country.

Last November, we sent out 400+ copies of a special Illinois-focused print issue of College Inside to people in the state prison system as an experiment. Based on an overwhelmingly positive response from incarcerated readers, we’ll now be sending a print publication into Illinois prisons and jails every quarter, just before the statewide Prisoncast! show broadcasts on Illinois Public Radio stations. We sent out Issue 2 earlier this week. (You can download the PDF here.)

Be sure to tune into the upcoming Prisoncast! broadcast airing March 30 at 2 pm central time on Illinois Public Radio stations. It will feature a conversation between me and WBEZ host Erin Allen about the earned time law. You can listen live online at wbez.org or tune in to local NPR stations in Illinois.

Please let us know if you share the College Inside x Prisoncast! newsletter with your incarcerated students!

Read more about our collaboration.

Let’s connect

Interested in reaching people who care about higher education in prisons? Get in touch at sales@opencampusmedia.org or request our media kit.

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What does "rehabilitation" really mean?

Charlotte West — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 20:20:26 +0000

A biweekly newsletter about the intersection of higher education and criminal justice. Written by Open Campus national reporter Charlotte West.

Short on time? Here are the highlights:

A visit to WBEZ Chicago led to conversations with currently and formerly incarcerated students about the meaning of rehabilitation and what counts as higher education.
Our local reporter from WBEZ Lisa Kurian Phillip reports on a proposal in the Illinois legislature to restore state financial aid to incarcerated students amid concerns about federal funding rollbacks.
In a first-person essay, Kwaneta Harris questions the celebration of Black History Month in a system that sanitizes history education, bans books by Black authors, and prevents women’s access to basic health information.
ICYMI: Windward Community College is expanding its Hawaiian Studies degree to a private prison in Arizona that houses incarcerated men from Hawai‘i.

Incarcerated people are told to rehabilitate themselves. But nobody will tell them how.

Incarcerated students at Sheridan Correctional Center in Illinois. Charlotte West/Open Campus

Earlier this month, I spent a week in Chicago with my colleagues at WBEZ. It was a busy week with a visit to Sheridan Correctional Center, a community listening session with several formerly incarcerated people, and a snow storm.

Thinking beyond rehabilitation

It was still dark (and frigid) when Alex Keefe and Lauren Frost from WBEZ’s Prisoncast! team picked me up outside my downtown hotel for the 1.5-hour journey to Sheridan. There we joined a class led by Lewis University teaching fellow Alex Negron, who is among the first incarcerated adjunct professors in the country.

During our discussion, students challenged the concept of “rehabilitation.” One participant who had spent 33 years behind bars shared a story about the judge at his resentencing hearing. Despite the man’s extensive educational achievements, including college credits, numerous certificates from prison programs, and contributions to a published book, he said the judge delivered a devastating assessment: “‘Your education only establishes your intelligence. It does not establish your rehabilitation.’"

Another student, who had been incarcerated since he was a teenager, lamented the lack of opportunities for people with long sentences. “The state of Illinois said that I was in prison, not seeking an education, not attempting to work, sitting idle as though it was my decision," he said.

Another man expressed frustration about the lack of clear criteria: "In the 21 years I've been in, the definition of rehabilitation…has never actually been communicated to me." In the absence of any official guidance, he said he’d developed his own criteria: "For me, it means I'm just trying to be a better person at night, whenever my head hits the pillow, than I was whenever I woke up that morning, and I hope the right people notice it."

Later that week at our Chicago listening session, Renaldo Hudson, education director at the Illinois Prison Project, also advocated for a more expansive view of education that recognizes that “rehabilitation” happens in many forms—not just through formal degrees. “The language of higher education tends to marginalize a lot of people because the majority of people inside don't have access to this higher education, but they're [still] very educated," he said.

Hudson described how he had helped foster a learning environment during his decades behind bars by creating his own program. "We went from being locked down all day to turning the day room into classrooms," he said. Yet as he noted, incarcerated people rarely get credit for these cultural shifts.

Finding purpose through education

WBEZ Chicago engagement editor Alex Keefe interviews incarcerated students at Sheridan Correctional Center in Illinois. Charlotte West/Open Campus

Many students also connected education to their family relationships. One father explained, "I decided to enroll into college after I acquired my GED... to prove to my son that no matter what you do in life, you can always decide to choose to do better."

In one particularly moving moment, a student described how he had used the prison tablet system to connect with his son through music. "My son failed honors piano in high school, and I didn't know he knew how to play the piano," he explained. The father found piano tutorials on his prison tablet and began teaching his son remotely. "I knew I failed in third grade, and I didn't want him to be comfortable with failing. I wanted him to be comfortable with the idea of, ‘You failed. Now we can get better and move on.’"

His son eventually passed the piano class. "It gave me an opportunity to continue to be a father to my child with this big gap between us," he reflected. "Music is now a big part of his life in high school."

For many, education also offers a way to reclaim their own narratives. One teaching fellow at Sheridan explained, "By you being able to take control of your story and taking advantage of opportunities to tell your story, that's what gives you power. ... I allowed everybody else to tell my story, except myself, and it wasn't until I started to take power of my own narrative that great things started to happen."

The theme of narrative control also came up repeatedly back in Chicago. Since his release in 2022, Angel Pantoja said he has shared his story over 100 times to legislators, universities, and various audiences. He now works for Illinois’ lieutenant governor helping people navigate reentry. Speaking opportunities in prison classrooms taught participants how to tell their stories in a positive way.

Information barriers inside prison walls

Lewis University teaching fellow Alex Negron leads a class discussion at Sheridan Correctional Center in Illinois. Charlotte West/Open Campus

When we asked the Sheridan students about their biggest challenges related to college and career, many pointed to the lack of basic information about professional paths. "We need more access to information about career goals," one student said. "If I was able to get online [I could] look up Indeed and see what the criteria is for jobs in my field... we need to know if there are limitations or not, and we don't have access to that."

With formal education opportunities limited, self-education becomes essential. Students described creating their own opportunities - from sharing legal knowledge to forming learning communities around shared interests like Magic: The Gathering card games, yoga practice, or cooking techniques.

"We had to teach one another, because nobody else was going to teach us,” one man said. “Nobody else wanted us to do anything and be positive and thrive."

Several men said they were interested in entrepreneurship training and had a need for financial literacy. One even mentioned a credit union that allows incarcerated people to open accounts. But they also stressed challenges in getting the necessary documentation for ID verification. We met one student who said he had created his own LLC while inside with the goal of promoting the work of incarcerated artists, writers, poets.

One teaching fellow also noted how exposure to educational options had expanded students' thinking. He said that when he was growing up, career options to him meant being a rapper, a basketball player, or working for the city: "Looking at the Lewis University folder to see the different degree programs they offer, it [was] like, 'Oh, if I would have known some of these things when I was younger, I probably could have dreamed a little bit different.'"

Career transitions after release

Open Campus held a community listening session at the Illinois Prison Project earlier this month. Photo: Maria Garza.

At our Chicago listening session later in the week, formerly incarcerated participants shared insights about the professional challenges they faced after release. Many stressed the importance of learning professional norms and communication. "We lose some of our social skills," said Jamal Bakr, who was released at the end of December.

Despite these challenges, many have built successful careers that were bolstered by experience with education inside. Jimmy Soto, a graduate of Northwestern's prison education program and the longest-serving exoneree in Illinois history, has leveraged public speaking training into paid speaking engagements at top universities. Soto is now preparing to go to law school, and others have moved into policy work, violence prevention, and government positions.

The formerly incarcerated participants also stressed the importance of system-impacted people leading reentry efforts. "I want us system-impacted folks to be the leaders in reentry, because no one else is going to understand our journey or our pain or our healing like us," Pantoja said.

Illinois weighs restoring state financial aid to students in prison

A prison classroom at Sheridan Correctional Center in Illinois. Charlotte West/Open Campus

Researchers have found that higher education is one of the most effective ways to prevent people who have been incarcerated from re-offending. Yet just 615 out of 29,470 incarcerated people in Illinois are enrolled in college classes, according to the Education Justice Project based at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

But legislation reintroduced in the Illinois legislature this session could expand access by restoring state financial aid for incarcerated students. That funding could prompt more universities to bring their classes into prisons.

Advocates say passing the legislation is of particular importance in this moment. Many fear the Trump administration will cut federal funding for incarcerated students, which was recently reinstated. State funding could balance out that potential loss and, supporters hope, get college programs into prisons in all corners of the state.

Read the full story.

Related: “A milestone in New York.”

First Person: ‘They ban books by Black authors. Then they tell us to celebrate Black History Month.’

Books about race, gender, and health are often banned in prisons. Charlotte West/Open Campus

Kwaneta Harris, a writer incarcerated in Texas, questions the celebration of Black History Month in a system that erases history and bans books.

While recent headlines focus on the dismantling of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives across America's higher education system, such erasure of diverse perspectives is nothing new behind prison walls. As state legislatures and boards of regents debate whose histories deserve telling, those of us behind bars have long faced explicit bans on texts that challenge dominant narratives or examine racial and gender justice.

This is the same prison library that bans works by Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, bell hooks and other Black female intellectuals under the guise of preventing "critical race theory indoctrination." The selective censorship of Black feminist authors reflects the system’s fear of Black women who speak their truths.

When Kimberlé Crenshaw's intersectionality framework is banned, when Nikole Hannah-Jones's 1619 Project is deemed dangerous, when Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and other literary masterpieces are labeled "inappropriate," the message is clear: our full humanity threatens the established order.

Read the rest of Kwaneta's essay.

Let’s connect

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College Inside

'If they ever open the door, watch what I can do'

David Carrillo spent three decades dreaming about getting out of prison. Here's what he's built after two years of freedom.

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Earning a degree behind bars is difficult. Finding housing after release can be harder.

Formerly incarcerated graduates face another hurdle on the outside: stable housing

‘They ban books by Black authors. Then they tell us to celebrate Black History Month.’

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State coalitions emerge as key infrastructure for higher education in prison

How do you get everyone on the same page?

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The Recordkeeping Problem Keeping People Locked Up Longer

‘No Good Time For You’

An inside look at college in Indiana Women’s Prison

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One prisoner's fight to expand work release jobs in Wisconsin

A century after pioneering work release, Wisconsin corrections officials don't track how many prisoners participate

Work release jobs are scarce, prisoners say

Officials and prisoners tout benefits

No statewide data available

Prisoner pushes for more jobs

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This class helps incarcerated men learn about fatherhood

‘Our most important goal is to create better fathers, and employment is one part of that.’

Fatherhood 101

Fatherhood, inside

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Parole boards say education matters. Their denials tell a different story.

Illinois edition of College Inside out now

The 2026-2027 FAFSA for incarcerated students now available

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The waiting game

For every incarcerated student in Illinois prisons, another waits their turn.

How long’s the wait? Depends on geography

Waitlist time down for high school-level courses

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Four takeaways from our survey on college and career after prison

‘Don't assume you're limited to trades or manual labor’

People assume degrees will open all doors while not always understanding what career paths their degrees actually enable.

Tech is a barrier in job searches. Learning digital skills can also help build social capital.

Higher education in prison can be transformative, but lack of experience remains a hurdle when job searching.

The most valuable reentry information came from other formerly incarcerated people, not formal programs.

College Inside nominated for INN's Breaking Barriers Award

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"AmeriCorps gave me a bridge back to society. Then Trump cut the funding."

Federal funding cuts have outsized consequences for formerly incarcerated people

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Students find belonging in a Michigan prison

What it means to belong to a college community

“For the first time in a very long time, you trusted.”

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A look (and listen) inside the dreaded prison education waitlist

One Illinois man’s 18-year journey to get his GED

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College Inside wants to hear from you

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Educating the campus and community about life after prison

How San Francisco State is educating its students — and the community — about life after prison

Educating the community