There are a host of stories and piles of data about the benefits of providing educational opportunities for incarcerated people, but for someone like Emma Chaput, who teaches those classes and processes the endless piles of required paperwork, it is often the seemingly insignificant thing that reveals the value of such efforts.
“From the very first day, when we did introductions, I said I hoped we could use our real first names because so often students use prison nicknames, and the corrections officers use their last name or no name.,” Chaput said. “When I addressed one student and said that I thought his name was Brandon, he looked surprised.”
She continued: “He paused and looked at me and said, ‘I can’t remember the last time someone called me that.’ It was a simple thing, but it said a lot to me.”
Educators like Chaput at community colleges nationwide who have led efforts to provide incarcerated people with higher education opportunities, see large and small successes happen often. And now, they say, those efforts have gotten a boost as Pell Grant funding has again become available for these students, though the process for obtaining it is daunting.
Chaput, a biology professor at Central Oregon Community College (COCC), has been a force behind that school’s launch of a successful prison education program, which was the first and, thus far, only community college prison education effort to qualify for the Pell Grant funding for its students under recent legislation.
“If we had had to entirely self-fund through grants and donations, this program would have taken a much longer time to come to being, if it did so at all. The possibility of federal financial aid is a primary reason that there was broad support, and it has been successful,” she said.
But she and other officials note that the three-step process for funding – gaining approval with the corrections department at various levels, an accreditation body and then the U.S. Education Department (ED) – involves time, energy and the completion of a lot of paperwork.
“It is challenging,” she said.
Group effort
Experts say about 30 colleges have applied for Pell Grant approval and only a handful have gained it, but Jessica Neptune, director of national engagement for the Bard College Prison Initiative (BPI), which supports a consortium of 18 colleges that champion the effort, is optimistic. She noted that while access to Pell grants will bolster the efforts significantly, prison education programs are thriving without it and proving their value.
“With the Consortium for the Liberal Arts in Prison now in its 15th year, we are seeing thousands of alumni across the country returning home, demonstrating in their lives and careers what happens when we expand access to college opportunity to those most excluded, most underestimated, most harmed by systems of discrimination, disinvestment and legacies of White supremacy,” she said.
COCC is the only community college in the consortium.
Along with advocating for prison education and Pell Grant funding and helping colleges build their programs, BPI is focusing on state funding for the programs and troublesome bans on such support.
“There have been a couple big victories to undo state-level legislative bans on this aid for incarcerated people,” Neptune said. “There are lots of other states that had de facto bans where the understanding has been that when Pell comes back, state-level aid will as well. But those states vary in terms of process barriers that may or may not make applying for aid possible. We are working to change the law where the law still bans access in states like Illinois, Pennsylvania and Maine”
Proven results, but funding needed
BPI and other advocates point to data that should indicate to policymakers that it’s wise to support such programs because they prove their value. An often-quoted 2019 Rand Corporation study noted that 30% of incarcerated persons don’t have a high school degree, one-third have low levels of literacy and half have very low math skills, even as the number and range of jobs requiring higher education is spiking. It also noted that prison jobs and training rarely advance those skills.
Yet, 42% of inmates sought educational opportunities, the study noted, despite its limited availability.
The study also states that for every $1 invested in prison education saved more than $4, and that inmates who participate in correctional education programs had 43% lower odds of recidivating and better odds of getting a job after release.
Unfortunately, funding has often been a problem for such programs.
In a New York Times article, BPI Founder and Executive Director Max Kemmer noted that college-in-prison efforts were once common and grew as Pell grants became available for a growing prison population.
“Still, in 1994, amid a tough-on-crime frenzy, Congress voted to keep people in prison from receiving Pell Grants — saving a mere $35 million per year as those same legislators directed more than $7 billion toward building new prisons,” he wrote. “The ban decimated the field nationwide.”
However, legislation from 2020 again made incarcerated students eligible for Pell grants, which began to be allocated last year.
Denisse Martinez, director of the Prison to College Pipeline at the John Jay College Institute for Justice and Opportunity, which is now offering courses in collaboration with New York’s Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC), says that community colleges hoping to gain Pell Grant funding for their students will have to be patient.
“It is a lot of work, but I think the Department of Education is doing due diligence to make certain that these programs are well-conceived and solid,” she said, noting, however, that progress is likely to be slow.
During the first step of the process – working with correction departments, for instance – there is considerable paperwork and review, yet those departments often aren’t knowledgeable about the programs or equipped to handle the process. Then the application must go to the college’s accreditor and, finally, ED.
Making it work
Michelle Ronda, a BMCC professor of criminal justice who has worked with incarcerated students at various locations and is now with the Prison to College Pipeline, says no matter how it is funded, the payoff for the student is substantial.
“One of the students said that although he may have first become interested in college in prison for the chance to reduce his sentence, he quickly found that the college program offered him a way to transform into a different person, with more educated opinions, wisdom, self-confidence and self-possession,” she said.
While such programs are promoted as a way to improve public safety and save money, they should also view them as “more than just based on a cost-benefit analysis,” Ronda said. “Higher education, whether for incarcerated students or students in the community, develops critical-thinking skills that connect people to the world in expansive ways and help them become thoughtful, participatory citizens.”
It makes them better parents and role models, better candidates for jobs and employees and better citizens, she continued.
The efforts also address the issue of potential injustice and racism in the criminal justice system.
“Black and Latino people are 36% of the total state population in New York and 34% of the students enrolled in public colleges in the state. But they make up 73% of the prison population,” Ronda said.
Moving in the right direction
Students from at Otisville Correctional Facility in upstate New York can now pursue an associate of arts degree in liberal arts from BMCC, taking a variety of courses. This semester, there are about 35 Otisville students enrolled in nine courses, including introductory Spanish, introduction to sociology, public speaking, introduction to theater, and an upper-level English class on science fiction.
Ronda hopes the program could triple in size, based on the interest expressed at the two institutions and among the inmates.
At COCC, the first cohort of 18 students seeking an associate degree at Deer Ridge Correctional Institution in Madras, Oregon, began its first term of classes last April. More than 40 individuals applied to join the program, one of only four such prison-based, degree programs in the state. One of Chaput’s goals is to connect the program with a four-year degree-granting institution to which students can transfer.
The courses are taught in person, mostly by fully tenured COCC faculty who receive training from both institutions and ongoing support from the college. They teach in a Deer River classroom and computer lab.
Chaput said her work to build and maintain the program and get the Pell Grant funding have been consuming but rewarding. And, she added, the value is in line with the goals of community college.
“The COCC mission is to empower students through high-quality, equitable and accessible lifelong education. When we acknowledge that incarcerated people are a part of our community, it seems self-evident that this work is important for community colleges,” she said. “There are many lenses through which we can explore why this is important, from reducing recidivism, to increasing public safety, to decreasing public funds spent on incarceration. For me, the most resonant lens is education equity and access, which is a foundational principle of community colleges, generally.”
