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

Happy Friday! This is a little different than our normal College Inside emails, but I wanted to send a quick note on this Friday the 13th about some updates here at Open Campus. 

I want to remind our subscribers that our survey on college and career during reentry closes on Monday, June 16. If you are formerly incarcerated, please take a few minutes to fill it out. We want to hear directly from you about your experiences with education and training inside, as well as with navigating college and the labor market after you came home. This survey will help inform our coverage and content in the future as we try to help close the information gap for incarcerated readers. 

I’ve had several folks ask me if system-impacted folks were involved with the survey design. The answer is yes. We are working with Jobs for the Future’s Center for Justice & Economic Advancement on this project, and they have a currently incarcerated employee who reviewed the questions before we launched the survey. The need to hear directly from people with lived experience is exactly why we are sending doing this. We are hoping it will be a first step towards creating more avenues for readers. 

If you are an administrator, educator, or correctional official, we would also like to hear from you about how federal policies are impacting your prison education programs. We’re carefully tracking issues such as the cuts to Americorps funding and the proposal to restrict part-time Pell enrollment, which would have a disproportionate impact on incarcerated students. While the latter seems to be on pause for now, things change rapidly in our nation’s capital. Please reach out!

In other news, we also sent out the latest print issue of College Inside to over 1,000 incarcerated readers earlier this week. Thousands more will be able to access it on Edovo. This issue features two stories by reporters in our local reporting network. The cover story is Maddy Franklin's piece for PublicSource about "Hamlet" at Allegheny County Jail. This issue also includes Sneha Dey's reporting for The Texas Tribune on Lee College's reentry preparation program in Texas prisons. Other content includes my stories about cultural education in Oregon and Hawaii, the suspension of Auburn University's bachelor's program, as well as a profile of an Illinois man studying for a law degree from behind bars in Minnesota. If you are a prison educator or librarian, please download the PDF to share with your students and patrons.

Finally, tune into WBEZ’s Prisoncast! this Sunday, June 15 from 2-4pm Central for a special broadcast airing on public radio stations across Illinois and online at WBEZ.org. It’s a radio show made with and for people affected by incarceration in Illinois. I’m really excited that a story we’ve been working on for months will finally hit the airwaves. Because of one man’s meticulous paper trail, I’ll take you inside the bureaucratic nightmare of education waiting lists. Learn more at WBEZ.org/prisoncast.

We hope to hear from you!

Thanks for your support. 

Charlotte West

P.S. In case you missed it, check out my latest story on how San Francisco State University is educating its campus and community about the realities of reentry. 

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.