- College Inside
- Posts
- Creating a pathway for incarcerated college graduates
Creating a pathway for incarcerated college graduates
Charlotte West
October 07, 2024
A biweekly newsletter about the future of postsecondary education in prisons. Written by Open Campus national reporter Charlotte West.
Short on time? Here are the highlights:
This week we’re back in Illinois, with a story on a recent federal class action lawsuit alleging that Illinois prisons have failed to provide special education services to young people with disabilities for almost two decades, copublished with our local newsroom partner WBEZ. We also wrote about another lawsuit that claims officials at Stateville discriminated against Black students enrolled in Northwestern University’s bachelor’s program.
A look at the first graduate degree in California prisons reveals the complicated nature of funding prison education programs and the uneasy partnership between agencies with different primary missions. Copublished with LAist.
Registration is now open for the virtual Incarcerated Scholars Conference organized by the Alliance for Higher Education in Prison October 29-30.
A new report from ITHAKA S+R focuses on how college-in-prison programs receiving Pell are meeting the requirement to document how they provide reentry services.
ICYMI: We looked at a ban against Wisconsin Books to Prisoners, a nonprofit organization that provides free books to people incarcerated in Wisconsin. The ban is based on an uptick of “bad actors” impersonating legitimate organizations, according to the state corrections department.
Photo courtesy of California State University Dominguez Hill
California’s first graduate program in prison faces an uncertain future
A year ago, California State University Dominguez Hills started the state’s first master’s degree program for incarcerated students, with the goal of creating a pathway for a growing number of college graduates to continue their education behind bars. Already, its future is uncertain.
The state agency that paid tuition for 31 students in the inaugural class of the humanities graduate program says it may have made a mistake.
Not all of the students funded by the Department of Rehabilitation, which provides vocational services for people with disabilities seeking employment, should have been deemed eligible for its services, officials said. And that means that both students already enrolled and new ones seeking to start the grad program may have no way to pay for classes.
Now, students are anxious and college officials are scrambling to find alternative ways to cover tuition costs.
More than a month after classes officially started, around a third of the 41 students who had been accepted into the program’s second cohort had not yet received funding. The rest of the students are in limbo: some have explicitly been denied funding, others are waiting to see if the funding will be approved, and a few haven’t even had interviews about their eligibility for support yet. And some students in the first cohort are wondering if they’ll be able to finish their degrees.
Access to graduate programs inside is becoming increasingly important as the number of bachelor’s programs in prison grows with the return last year of Pell Grant eligibility for incarcerated students. Since the first incarcerated bachelor’s graduates got their degrees from California State University Los Angeles at the state prison in Lancaster in 2021, California prisons now offer 11 bachelor’s programs, with two more starting next year.
Read the rest of the story.
Related coverage: Incarcerated Californians are doing college by mail. It makes it harder to get to the finish line.
Lawsuit claims disabled young people in Illinois prisons were denied special education for years
Shutterstock
A new lawsuit claims Illinois has been violating state and federal law for nearly two decades by failing to provide special education services to young people locked up in adult prisons.
The federal lawsuit against the Illinois Department of Corrections, the Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice and the Illinois State Board of Education was filed at the end of last month. On Wednesday, plaintiffs filed a motion seeking to make the case a class action lawsuit. Attorneys estimate the suit could affect hundreds of individuals currently in custody.
The lawsuit was filed by Equip for Equality, a nonprofit advocating for the civil rights of individuals with disabilities, and Latham & Watkins. It covers those who were 22 or younger when they were first incarcerated and who had a plan outlining special education services from their previous school.
The complaint states that the correctional agencies have failed to identify eligible students; notify eligible students of their right to these educational services; or provide any special education services and high school credit-bearing courses.
“These violations are the result of a widespread failure to attend to the educational welfare and needs of students with disabilities who have not yet earned their high school diploma,” the complaint reads.
A spokesperson for the Illinois Department of Corrections declined to comment, citing the pending litigation.
Plaintiff Exodus Hebert, now 23, was 20 years old when he was admitted to the Illinois Department of Corrections. He had received special education while in the custody of the juvenile system but was unable to access those same services in the adult system, he wrote in an email.
“I really need this special education so I can finally get my high school diploma,” he wrote. “It’s very hard to understand schooling with the disability I have.”
Hebert wants to show his family he did something great and also demonstrate to others who struggle with education that it’s still possible to achieve something. “I enjoyed school. It was just so hard but when I did understand it, it meant the world to me,” he said.
Read the rest of the story.
Related coverage: ‘There’s no equality’ for disabled students in prison
Black students allege unjust discipline in Northwestern’s prison ed program
Stateville Correctional Facility in Illinois. Sun Times file photo.
A pair of federal lawsuits claim the Illinois Department of Corrections unjustly disciplined two Black students in Northwestern University’s prison education program because the students worked together to prevent university staff from harassment during their visits to the prison. Corrections officials deemed the coordinated effort to “stop problems” gang-related activity, according to the federal complaints.
The lawsuits were filed last month. The plaintiffs, LeShun Smith and Brian McClendon, allege they were denied due process and targeted because of their race, violating their constitutional rights and effectively ending their education, said their attorney, Alan Mills.
“The heart of this case is about clearing their names so that they are not forever labeled as gang members and engaging in gang activity, and to be able to resume their education,” Mills told WBEZ.
Both Smith and McClendon were expecting to graduate with bachelor’s degrees from Northwestern in December 2024 before the disciplinary infractions disrupted their studies. They were removed from the college program and transferred to other correctional facilities across the state. Northwestern is one of several college programs that operated at Stateville Correctional Facility before the population there was transferred out in September due to an order by a federal judge.
A spokesperson for the Illinois Department of Corrections denied students were removed from the Northwestern program “for a discriminatory purpose.”
Read the full story at WBEZ.
Related coverage: What will the Stateville shutdown mean for higher education in prison?
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 Twitter, 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.
Know others that are interested in higher ed in prisons? Let them know about the newsletter. Thanks!
You currently have 0 referrals, only 2 away from receiving a Twitter Shoutout.
Or copy and paste this link to others: https://college-inside.beehiiv.com/subscribe?ref=2p6y6raqDY