Introduction

Higher education in prison (HEP) is at a critical juncture. Just the past five years have seen the launch of the Second Chance Pell pilot program, a strong and growing cohort of college- and university-affiliated HEP programs, and sharpened national focus on the intersection of systemic racism, mass incarceration, and the pursuit of educational equity.¹ As the compelling examples of individual and societal benefits from HEP have accumulated, they reinforced the decades-long campaign to restore Pell Grants for incarcerated students, culminating in the passage of the Pell Grant Restoration Act in December 2020. And so we stand on the cusp of expanding HEP to hundreds of thousands of the nation’s 2.1 million incarcerated adults, and the realization of the incredible opportunity that provides for them, for their families and communities, and for the nation.

With HEP and related legislation poised to continue to grow, it is more important than ever to ensure that all stakeholders have appropriate insight into program characteristics, access, efficacy, and equity. Unfortunately, we are starting behind the curve. Unlike other sectors of higher education, HEP does not have systematic data collection and public reporting, an organized network of researchers and funders of research, or a quality assurance framework. Bolstering this research and data infrastructure would help to guide everyone involved in HEP: policymakers deciding how to legislate, philanthropists deciding which programs to fund, department of corrections (DOC) staff deciding how to implement such programming, faculty deciding how to design and deliver course content, college leadership deciding on the degrees their programs will award, researchers looking to build robust and rigorous research agendas, and students deciding whether and how to pursue postsecondary coursework.

Higher Education in Prison Research Project

Higher Education in Prison Research is a project managed by Ithaka S+R and funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation with the goal of helping the field accelerate the collection, dissemination, and utilization of research about postsecondary prison programs and their students. It aims to build consensus among a diverse array of stakeholders involved in postsecondary education in prisons— including program practitioners, government policymakers, college administrators, corrections professionals, academic researchers, scholarly publications, private philanthropy, and, most importantly, HEP students themselves—around building on extant developments in the field to establish shared rigorous research processes and practice standards. In other words, this project aims to facilitate the development of an HEP research infrastructure (RI) in the US, a concept we flesh out in more detail in the next sections. Our ultimate goal is to support HEP programs, practices, and policies that provide high-quality and equitable postsecondary education to a greater number of incarcerated people—and to improve their outcomes while incarcerated and, when applicable, following release.

This working paper is an integral part of the project. Hosted on a dedicated and public digital space, it is designed as a dynamic working document and starting point for communal discussion. It invites the HEP community at large to engage with, interrogate, and provide feedback on information, ideas, and suggestions we propose as facilitators in this space. This includes our framing of the issue at hand, our description of the state of HEP research, and our suggested strategies for collaborating around advancing an HEP research infrastructure to promote equitable access to quality programming and subsequent student success.

We hope you will interact with the working paper’s discussion prompts and comment forms to voice your critical reception. All public reactions will contribute to shaping the next phases of our project, which you can read about on our project’s “About” page. We also encourage readers to sign-up for project alerts, which will keep those interested in our work apprised of different efforts throughout the project cycle, including webinars and workgroup sessions, and to widely share both the project’s digital space and this working paper with peers and colleagues.

One last note before we orient the reader to the different sections of this working paper: In accord with other scholarly discussions involving individuals in the carceral space, we employ person-centered language throughout this paper and view incarceration as a condition rather than as a permanent characteristic. As such, with the understanding that this paper is focused on higher education in the prison context, we refer to students and learners behind bars from here on out as just that–students and learners.

What is your history with higher education in prison (HEP)?

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See, for example, Kritika Agarwal, “Inside Higher Ed: College-In-Prison Programs Flourish, But For How Long?” (2018); Elizabeth Hinton, “Turn Prisons into Colleges” (2018); and John J. Lennon, “Why Colleges Should Take a Chance on Prisoners Like Me,” (2021).

Responses

The Role of an HEP RI in Serving Incarcerated Youth

Julissa O. Muñiz

As an educational researcher who works with incarcerated youth living and learning in a juvenile detention center, I am excited at the idea of how a Higher Education in Prison Research Infrastructure (HEP RI) might open up the ways we theorize and study learning in carceral contexts. Within the prison education literature, “learning” is primarily, and sometimes solely, measured by the number of degrees conferred and decreased recidivism rates, data that has been instrumental to the expansion of prison education programming, including HEP. However, now more than ever we need more situated and expansive conceptualizations of learning that consider its benefits more holistically (Nasir & Hand, 2006; Rogoff, 2003). Developing an HEP RI promises to help researchers finally move to a place of studying learning in context to better understand the tools, artifacts, and processes that mediate learning within carceral spaces (Cole, 1998; Esmonde & Booker, 2017). These questions, I argue, are just as or more important to the study of education in prison, particularly as more prisons look to expand HEP programming with the reinstatement of Federal Pell Grants for incarcerated college students. Within my own work, I find that the aforementioned measures do not sufficiently capture the nuance, complexity, and depth of what it means to learn in the carceral context, nor does it help us improve the learning conditions and educational outcomes of students. An HEP RI can facilitate this charge to co-create more humane, student-centered, and evidence-based emancipatory learning environments using high-quality research as the vehicle. Further, as an educational ethnographer and learning scientist who studies teaching, learning, and adolescent identity development within carceral contexts, I find the push to create an HEP RI consequential to the lives of all incarcerated students. This includes adolescents and emerging adults who may not yet be eligible for post-secondary coursework. Currently, most of the HEP discourse has primarily focused on the educational experiences and needs of adults–rightfully so, given that the vast majority of those confined are adults. But this creates a gaping need to better understand the learning and schooling experiences of incarcerated youth. Unlike their adult counterparts, incarcerated youth have “statutory rights to education services of comparable quality to those found in public schools” (Leone & Wruble, 2015). Although what that looks and feels like is often inconsistent, inadequate, and merits further analysis (Leone & Wruble, 2015; Vaught, 2017). In some states, juvenile facilities also offer limited post-secondary programming to youth. Within the HEP literature, however, those partnerships, programs, and student experiences have gone largely unexamined. Though there may be fewer HEP programs at the juvenile level, an HEP RI could help highlight the benefits of including young people in HEP research. In the course of my own research, I had the opportunity to conduct focus groups and interviews with some of the college program graduates at a juvenile detention center. It is there that I learned the importance and impact of “trying on” a college student identity for these youth. Knowing they had participated in and successfully completed college coursework changed their orientation to the possibility of being able to attend college post-release. As one student explained, “I was amped up, I was happy, and I was excited to be able to have that little bit of college experience that I could get, since I didn’t even finish high school yet.” Establishing an HEP RI could help bring visibility to these experiences as well as to the importance of expanding quality post-secondary programming into correctional facilities that are often deemed temporary and outside the purview of higher education in prison. Knowing that one of the primary predictors of adult incarceration is early contact with the juvenile legal system (Jaggers et al., 2016), more research should focus on interrupting and dismantling these patterns by providing access to evidence-based programming, such as post-secondary education, even if only to give youth a taste of what it might mean to be a college student in the free world.

HEP is a Public Good

Eugene M. Tobin

Four and a half years ago, I walked into a maximum-security prison for the first time and observed a group of incarcerated students discussing the impact of college-level course work on their lives and those of their families. Having served as a college president and as a program officer at a national foundation, I had heard my fair share of eloquent and persuasive students speak about the value of their educational experiences. But the level of the incarcerated students’ personal engagement and self-awareness, the analytic rigor and intellectual precision of their arguments, and their appreciation of the educational experience and its promise was transcendent. As the nation prepares for the restoration of Pell Grants to incarcerated learners, Ithaka S+R’s working discussion paper raises a fundamental question: How prepared are we—as academic leaders, education providers, correctional officials, researchers, funders, elected representatives, and citizens—to deliver on that promise and turn this long-awaited opportunity into a seamless, scalable, and sustainable structure that makes higher education in prison (HEP) an integral part of a more just society? The question impels us to differentiate the near universal support for HEP’s aspirational, life-changing commitment to restore equality, human dignity, and fairness to the lives of incarcerated people from the equally urgent but seemingly prosaic need to build a systematic research infrastructure that will sustain the maturation of this evolving field. From its earliest beginnings, American higher education’s unplanned, decentralized, autonomous system has equated a college education as a private good that passes on social privilege and advantage. Such a model is incompatible with the values, structural needs, and evidence-based decision-making needed to sustain an equitable and rigorous educational experience for the nation’s incarcerated students. By astutely unpacking the necessary conditions for an HEP coordinated research infrastructure and linking its existence to a sustainable HEP future, Ithaka S+R’s paper reminds us that systematically collected data about finances, enrollment, graduation rates, student demographics and outcomes are indispensable metrics. They represent the collective, longitudinal, student-centric experiences of a field that has always viewed higher education as serving a public good. HEP needs national communities of practice that link curriculum, program development, institutional research, and evaluation.

Facilitating a Higher Education in Prison Research Infrastructure

Introduction

Higher Education in Prison Research Project

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Responses

The Role of an HEP RI in Serving Incarcerated Youth

HEP is a Public Good