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

Short on time? Here are the highlights:

• Sister Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking, spends her birthday at DePaul University every April. Listen to WBEZ’s interview with the 87-year-old nun.

• A new report from the Sentencing Project documents what reentry looks like for people who have spent decades behind bars.

• A story from our local partner Wisconsin Watch looks at why few Wisconsin businesses use “second chance” bonds. 

_{Sister Prejean celebrates 15 years since Illinois abolished capital punishment}

The tulips, Sister Helen Prejean jokes, bloom for her birthday.

The nun and death penalty abolitionist turned 87 in April. Every year, she spends her birthday in Chicago at DePaul University, where she donated her personal archives in 2011: nearly 45 years of journals, letters, speeches and notes from her work to end capital punishment.

That work brought her to campus for an event marking the 15th anniversary of Illinois abolishing the death penalty. In previous years, she has also gone inside correctional facilities alongside students, including for a book club at Cook County Jail.

“When you bring students inside to actually meet real prisoners, they meet human beings,” Prejean told WBEZ. “Where human beings encounter real human beings, we both change.”

For DePaul and other colleges that see social justice as part of their educational mission, that kind of engagement — sending faculty and students inside prison walls while also bringing people who are incarcerated into academic conversations — is central to how they educate students.

Read the full story. 

A new report about 'learning life all over again' during reentry

A new report from the Sentencing Project documents what reentry looks like for people who have spent decades behind bars — and the picture is largely one of systems that failed them at every turn.

The report, published in April, is based on interviews with 33 people from seven states who served between 20 and 43 years in prison before being released between 2021 and 2024. The Sentencing Project, which does significant research and advocacy around extreme sentences, interviewed participants about their experiences inside, during the transition home, and in the months after release. The report's title comes from something one participant said when asked what would have helped them prepare to come home: learning life all over again.

Eight in ten participants said they faced long waitlists or were outright excluded from programming — including GED classes, college courses, and vocational training — because of their sentence length. Eighty-five percent of participants were 25 or younger when sentenced, the developmental window when people are most open to rehabilitation; and that's precisely when programming was denied or delayed. Without tailored programming and social support networks, the authors found, people returning after long-term incarceration are at a significant disadvantage from the start. 

Open Campus and WBEZ Chicago have documented this pattern in Illinois, where Juan Hernandez spent 18 years fighting bureaucratic barriers just to get his GED — and is still waiting to get into college. State data published last fall showed that for every person enrolled in a college program in an Illinois prison, another sits on a waitlist — with average waits of 1.3 years statewide, and nearly five years at the state's main women's prison.

The report doesn't capture whether participants who accessed formal education fared better post-release — the sample is too small and the study wasn't designed to measure that. But participants who fought their way into peer-led groups and self-help programming described those experiences as central to their reentry readiness, even when formal programs were out of reach.

The publication also documents what people come home to after decades inside: a digital world they weren't prepared for, no valid ID, little to no gate money, vocational certifications that aren't recognized by outside employers, and parole restrictions that can block job travel and family visits. Based on a self-reported measure of well-being, around 45% of participants described themselves as “thriving” at the time of their interviews. But more than half were “surviving” or “struggling.”

This is a population we've been watching as sentencing reforms bring more people home after extreme sentences. The Sentencing Project recommends that all imprisoned people have access to programming from day one, regardless of sentence length, and that gate money be raised to cover at least two weeks of expenses. It also calls for restoring the federal reentry funding the Trump administration cut in 2025.

‘Second chance’ bonds show promise. Few Wisconsin businesses use them.

For every 10 people released from Wisconsin’s prisons, just seven find jobs within two years — even as the state’s ongoing worker shortage leaves many employers scrambling to find the help they need. 

The struggle isn’t unique to Wisconsin. Formerly incarcerated people nationwide are far more likely to be unemployed than the general population. One reason: Though people with criminal records often outperform their colleagues, many employers worry they’ll be unreliable or even dangerous. 

That’s why, 60 years ago, the U.S. government began insuring employers against that risk, for free. 

The Federal Bonding Program, established in 1966, offers “fidelity bonds” to reimburse businesses for losses if the covered employee steals or commits fraud. 

Recent research suggests these bonds are one of the most effective ways the government can persuade employers to give jobs to people with criminal records. Those jobs have ripple effects.  Families become more financially stable, communities become safer — as people with jobs are less likely to commit new crimes — and taxpayers save money as fewer people return to prison.  

So why aren’t Wisconsin employers requesting these bonds? While some states issued hundreds last year, Wisconsin issued just three — even though an estimated 1.4 million Wisconsinites have a criminal record. 

Demand in the state is so low that when the federal government in 2019 offered Wisconsin $100,000 to spend on bonds, workforce officials used just $15,000.

To figure out what’s going on, Wisconsin Watch spoke to economists, insurance experts, criminologists and workforce development officials, who ranged from enthusiastic to cynical about bonding. 

Read the full story from our local partner Wisconsin Watch. 

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 [email protected] 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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