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. 

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. 

Related: Georgia State University pulls the plug on prison education

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

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.

Related: Slings and arrows set aside in Allegheny County Jail-based ‘Hamlet’ workshops

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 [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.

We know that not everyone has access to email, so if you’d like to have a print copy College Inside sent to an incarcerated friend or family member, you can sign them up here. We also publish the PDFs of our print newsletter on the Open Campus website.

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