A biweekly newsletter about the intersection of higher education and criminal justice. Written by Open Campus national reporter Charlotte West.

Short on time? Here’s what you need to know:

• Today, we’re showcasing our new Illinois-focused print issue of College Inside, produced in partnership with WBEZ’s Prisoncast! project. 

• Check out our coverage of a new class action lawsuit filed in Illinois last week challenging how prison officials have been calculating sentence credits. 

• Follow Open Campus and Charlotte West over on Bluesky!

• Our year-end fundraising campaign has begun. Please help support College Inside by making a donation.

• ICYMI: This story on what a new president might mean for education in prison offers some insights on the incoming administration.

We’ve got a new way to reach incarcerated readers in Illinois

Yesterday, our local partner WBEZ Chicago sent out 400+ copies of a special Illinois-focused print issue of College Inside to people incarcerated in the state prison system. We’ve been working closely with WBEZ’s team at Prisoncast!, an audio journalism project for people inside Illinois prisons and their loved ones on the outside, to help bridge the information gap faced by those living behind prison walls.

Open Campus has already been working alongside WBEZ to support local higher education coverage — that’s the collaborative local network model we use in 14 cities across the country. We form deep partnerships with existing newsrooms, combining our knowledge of higher education with their understanding of local communities. And, this project builds on our existing efforts to get print editions of this newsletter inside prison walls — we send them to more than 1,000 people every three months. 

Download the latest quarterly issue of College Inside, featuring our last few months of coverage of education during and after incarceration.

On our education and prisons beat, Charlotte West has been working with WBEZ’s education and criminal justice editor, Patrick Smith. Together, we’ve been following topics such as the poor implementation of a new earned time law that has left some people — who say they should be out — stuck in prison. One man we featured, Richard McConnell, was released just a few weeks after our initial reporting. But others say that almost a year after the new law went into effect, Illinois still hasn’t given them the sentence credits they’ve earned over decades of participation in work and education. 

Read more about the latest development in this earned time story: a new class action lawsuit filed in Illinois state court last week that paves the way for a broader legal challenge to how state prison officials have been calculating sentence reductions.

Charlotte also teamed up with Lauren Frost and Alex Keefe from Prisoncast! to cover the closure of Stateville, a century-old facility that was home to some of the most robust higher ed programming in Illinois, despite its crumbling infrastructure. We looked at how an order from a federal judge led to abrupt transfers of the Stateville population around the state, despite promises from prison officials to keep college programs together. We also asked the men who live there what they will remember about their time — and the community — at Stateville. 

The Illinois edition of College Inside, designed by Emily Jenkins, features these stories and more, including an article focused on a recent lawsuit about the lack of special education provided to young people with disabilities in the state prison system. It also has a survey that Prisoncast! is distributing to solicit input for its holiday show, airing Sunday, Dec. 22. (They’d love to hear from anyone in Illinois! You can listen live on WBEZ 91.5 FM or at wbez.org.)

“On Prisoncast!, our focus is making journalism with and for folks inside and their families, not just writing stories about them,” said Keefe, a WBEZ editor. “Open Campus shares that ethos, and our teamwork helps both of us better serve the community of people affected by incarceration with fact-based, verified news and information.”

Open Campus and WBEZ are two of just a handful of nonprofit newsrooms that are working to help bring news to the information deserts that most incarcerated people live in. The Marshall Project has been leading the way, with its News Inside and Inside Story projects, and local coverage of criminal justice in Mississippi and Alabama. Elsewhere, our publishing partner the Prison Journalism Project is providing journalism training to incarcerated writers to help them more effectively tell their own stories. 

This newsletter will soon celebrate its third birthday, and we’ve been thinking a lot about how our coverage has evolved over the last three years. You might have noticed that we just changed the tagline for College Inside to “a newsletter about the intersection of higher education and criminal justice” to better reflect the scope of the beat. 

While we continue to make our newsletter available to our incarcerated readers for free, your support helps make this work possible. Open Campus’s year-end fundraising campaign has begun, and your contributions help us produce College Inside and expand local higher-ed reporting in Illinois and elsewhere around the country. Please consider making a donation today.

We hope that our ongoing partnership with WBEZ, and this new, local print edition of College Inside focused on Illinois, can serve as a model demonstrating the power of local reporting. 

News, views, and more

The Hechinger Report and our local partner CalMatters published a story on the first college in the country to receive approval by the Education Department to offer the newly restored Pell Grants for incarcerated students and its program at California’s once-notorious supermax prison, Pelican Bay. 

A new report on higher education in Texas prisons, published by the nonprofit Texas 2036, found that the state has experienced a 50% decline in higher education enrollment among incarcerated individuals. From 2011 to 2022, enrollment dropped from 7,203 to 3,581 — suggesting a critical gap in the capacity of education programs in Texas prisons.

Prison ed researcher Erin Castro of the University of Utah published a new chapter, “Prison education is dangerous.” She argues that “in a context where individual incarcerated people have restricted autonomy, non-incarcerated students, staff, and faculty from colleges and universities can cause real harm by neglecting to consider the vast power differentials between non- or never-incarcerated educators and students in prison.” You can email [email protected] for a PDF of the chapter.

Roadtrip Nation will feature three formerly incarcerated individuals in a documentary where they’ll get to meet and interview inspiring people who have participated in higher ed programs during their time in prison, to learn about how they navigated their paths during and after incarceration. Find out more about the Higher Ed in Prison Storytelling Initiatve here (deadline Feb. 2, 2025). The project is also looking for a director with lived or personal experience with this theme. 

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.

There is no cost to subscribe to the print edition of College Inside. But as a nonprofit newsroom, we rely on grants and donations to keep bringing you the news about prison education. You can also donate here.

Interested in reaching people who care about higher education in prisons? Get in touch at [email protected] or request our media kit.

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