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

Short on time? Here are the highlights:

• We talked to federal Education Department staff affected by last week’s layoffs and other experts about what the Trump administration’s plans to dismantle the agency mean for prison education programs as well as incarcerated students and borrowers. 

• Carl Rogers walked out of an Illinois prison last week more than a year after Open Campus and WBEZ Chicago first featured his story. Rogers was released from prison because of a law that went into effect last year giving sentence credits for work and education, but he believes he served more than he should have. 

• We are launching a quarterly print issue of College Inside focused on Illinois in collaboration with WBEZ’s Prisoncast! team. 

There are more questions than answers about how the Education Department layoffs will affect education in prison

Somewhere on a desk in the federal Department of Education building in Washington D.C. sits a pile of unopened mail from incarcerated student loan borrowers. 

The person responsible for opening them was among the Education Department employees laid off in the past several weeks. 

After last week’s purge of nearly half of the Education Department’s workforce, everyone navigating federal financial aid faces challenges — including processing delays, reduced oversight of loan servicers, and diminished customer service. For incarcerated students and borrowers, however, these widespread problems are magnified. They can’t simply pick up a phone to call their loan servicer, check email for updates, or log into online portals. 

There are also more questions than answers about how higher education in prison programs will be affected given the unprecedented changes at the Education Department. In July 2023, approximately 700,000 incarcerated students became eligible for Pell Grants when the ban on federal financial aid for people in prison was fully lifted. But the expansion of new programs has been slow even before staff were laid off. 

While department officials confirm that new prison education programs have been approved in the weeks since Trump took office, there’s concern that the layoffs will slow the approval process even more and limit support for incarcerated students and borrowers. To further complicate things, President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order which calls on the Secretary of Education to take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Education Department. 

“Students in prison are often out of sight, out of mind, and they need advocates at the table when decisions get made about the programs that affect them,” said Ruth Delaney, director of the Vera Institute of Justice’s Unlocking Potential initiative.

Read the rest of the story. 

He won a yearlong fight to be released from prison, but says more deserve sentence reductions

Carl Rogers, whose story Open Campus and WBEZ first reported in April 2024, walked out of Robinson Correctional Center in Illinois on February 14. By his calculations, his release came more than a year later than it should have.

Rogers was released from prison because of a law that went into effect last year giving sentence credits for work and education. He contends he should have been eligible for release in January 2024, when the change took effect. The new program has been beset by bureaucratic failures, and there are still people in Illinois who believe they would be immediately eligible for release if the Illinois Department of Corrections had properly calculated their sentence credits.

Meanwhile, a December 2023 internal report obtained by Open Campus shows the department was aware of the recordkeeping issues that have plagued the new system before the sentence credit law even went into effect. That report estimates it could take until 2029 to digitize all records necessary for proper credit calculations.

Rogers couldn’t wait that long. After Open Campus first reported on his case, Rogers staged a hunger strike, along with other incarcerated individuals at Robinson, to try and force prison officials to review his case and award him the sentence credits. On Valentine’s Day, he was finally released after spending almost 32 years behind bars.

Read the rest of the story. 

College Inside and Prisoncast! team up to launch newsletter for people incarcerated in Illinois

I am teaming up with Lauren Frost and Alex Keefe from WBEZ Chicago’s Prisoncast! project to launch a quarterly print newsletter for people incarcerated in Illinois. This collaboration builds on Open Campus's network of higher education reporters working in partnership with 17 local newsrooms across the country.

Last November, we sent out 400+ copies of a special Illinois-focused print issue of College Inside to people in the state prison system as an experiment. Based on an overwhelmingly positive response from incarcerated readers, we’ll now be sending a print publication into Illinois prisons and jails every quarter, just before the statewide Prisoncast! show broadcasts on Illinois Public Radio stations. We sent out Issue 2 earlier this week. (You can download the PDF here.)

Be sure to tune into the upcoming Prisoncast! broadcast airing March 30 at 2 pm central time on Illinois Public Radio stations. It will feature a conversation between me and WBEZ host Erin Allen about the earned time law. You can listen live online at wbez.org or tune in to local NPR stations in Illinois. 

Please let us know if you share the College Inside x Prisoncast! newsletter with your incarcerated students!

Read more about our collaboration. 

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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