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A new report by the Vera Institute of Justice marks one year since the return of Pell Grants to incarcerated students and analyzes how programs can improve.
Students from Brave Behind Bars, an introductory computer science program for incarcerated people, talk about their projects during graduation at the D.C. Central Detention Facility in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 8, 2022.
Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post/Getty Images
Adecision by Congress to restore Pell Grants to incarcerated students took effect last summer, a win for students and their advocates after imprisoned people attending college were barred from the federal financial aid for almost three decades.
A year later, colleges and corrections agencies have made significant strides toward launching new Pell-eligible programs and expanding existing programs under new federal regulations. But current programs still have work to do to better serve incarcerated students, according to a recent report by the Vera Institute of Justice, a research and policy organization focused on criminal justice issues.
The report offers a “snapshot” of colleges’ progress toward creating new Pell-eligible programs and evaluates the “quality, equity and scale” of current college-in-prison programs at a time when they’re poised to grow. It finds that many programs meet important quality benchmarks, such as employing qualified professors, but fall short on other key measures—including some required by new federal regulations—like access to academic advising.
The report emphasizes that at least 45,000 incarcerated students have enrolled in college through Second Chance Pell, and those students earned upward of 18,000 credentials. Yet they make up only a fraction of the estimated 750,000 people in prison eligible to enroll, according to the report. And the majority of those people, about 70 percent, indicate in surveys that they’re interested in pursuing higher education. Prison populations are also disproportionately people of color; about 32 percent of prisoners are Black and 23 percent are Latino or Hispanic, even though less than 14 percent of the U.S. population is Black and only 19 percent is Latino or Hispanic, the report noted.
Erin L. Castro, associate dean for prison education pathways for undergraduate education and director of the Research Collaborative on Higher Education in Prison at the University of Utah, said she expects to see “sharp rises in both the numbers of colleges and universities deciding to serve incarcerated students and the numbers of incarcerated students who enroll.” At the same time, she said, “there are a lot of questions that remain unanswered” regarding how best to serve them.
Castro, who is also an associate professor of higher education, said the report starts to answer some of those questions and addresses long-standing calls among researchers and advocates for “some kind of framework for quality and for equity and for parity of outcomes.”
“This is, to our knowledge, really the first report of its kind,” said Ruth Delaney, director of Vera’s Unlocking Potential initiative, which supports the development of college-in-prison programs. “There’s almost no national data on college in prison” and “even less research attempting to measure performance of those programs.”
The report is based on surveys conducted at corrections agencies and 140 higher ed institutions operating academic programs in 47 state, territory and federal Bureau of Prisons facilities, collected between November 2023 and March 2024. In total, 153 colleges and universities offered programs during that period under Second Chance Pell, a pilot program launched in 2015 to allow incarcerated students to access Pell Grants in select programs. The report scored each jurisdiction, or system of prisons, as “adequate,” “inadequate” or “developing” on 15 different metrics, including how easily credits transfer between higher ed institutions and the availability of library and research resources.
“We’re trying to establish a floor” for what it means to be a quality program in prison, said Delaney. “What we really want to be thinking about in the future is what the ceiling could be.” Programs should be “really worth the investment of incarcerated students’ limited Pell funds.”
Progress Toward Pell Eligibility
New proposals for Pell-eligible programs are currently making their way through a multilevel approval process. Under recent federal regulations for Pell eligibility, college-in-prison programs have to be approved by state corrections agencies, the federal Bureau of Prisons or a sheriff, as well as an accreditor and the U.S. Department of Education.
The report notes that all states, Puerto Rico and the Bureau of Prisons have now set up processes to review Pell-eligible program proposals, which wasn’t the case a year ago. At least 50 colleges new to such programs have received approval from corrections agencies this year, Delaney noted. So far, only one new program has been reviewed and received final approval from the Department of Education, a communications bachelor’s degree program through California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, at Pelican Bay State Prison.
Delaney said that while such bureaucratic processes move slowly, the numbers are encouraging and show “a lot of enthusiasm” among colleges and corrections agencies to expand academic offerings in prisons at a time when “there’s still so much interest among students and unmet need.”
The report emphasizes that at least 45,000 incarcerated students have enrolled in college through Second Chance Pell, and those students earned upward of 18,000 credentials. Yet they make up only a fraction of the estimated 750,000 people in prison eligible to enroll, according to the report. And the majority of those people, about 70 percent, indicate in surveys that they’re interested in pursuing higher education. Prison populations are also disproportionately people of color; about 32 percent of prisoners are Black and 23 percent are Latino or Hispanic, even though less than 14 percent of the U.S. population is Black and only 19 percent is Latino or Hispanic, the report noted.
Erin L. Castro, associate dean for prison education pathways for undergraduate education and director of the Research Collaborative on Higher Education in Prison at the University of Utah, said she expects to see “sharp rises in both the numbers of colleges and universities deciding to serve incarcerated students and the numbers of incarcerated students who enroll.” At the same time, she said, “there are a lot of questions that remain unanswered” regarding how best to serve them.
Castro, who is also an associate professor of higher education, said the report starts to answer some of those questions and addresses long-standing calls among researchers and advocates for “some kind of framework for quality and for equity and for parity of outcomes.”
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