A biweekly newsletter about education and employment during and after prison. Written by Open Campus national reporter Charlotte West.

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

• The number of people coming home from prison with college degrees is expected to increase with the return of Pell Grants. Recognizing that housing underpins successful reentry, some prison education programs are expanding their services. College Inside visited Hudson Link in New York State. 

• In a first-person essay we published last year, incarcerated writer Kwaneta Harris asks: how can prisons celebrate Black History Month while banning the very books that tell Black history?

Formerly incarcerated graduates face another hurdle on the outside: stable housing

Marc Rowley and Hector Gonzalez walked through the door of Hudson Link's office in downtown Ossining empty-handed. The two men — both formerly incarcerated graduates of the organization’s prison education program — had just returned from the DMV, where Gonzalez had tried to get a driver’s license. It was the first official ID he’d ever had. But they'd hit a snag: he needed proof of address.

The two men met years earlier at the nearby Sing Sing Correctional Facility, New York’s oldest prison. Rowley was now 18 months into his own release and living in housing Hudson Link operates for formerly incarcerated alumni. When Gonzalez asked for help navigating the DMV — just three weeks after his release from serving more than 28 years in prison — Rowley's response was immediate: "I'll take you myself."

In the office where returning alumni regularly drop in for support, a Hudson Link staff member overheard their conversation. They pulled out a blank envelope, wrote down Gonzalez's address — one of Hudson Link’s houses in Ossining — and dropped it in the mail. Gonzalez could return to the DMV the following week with proof of address in hand.

For formerly incarcerated people like Gonzalez, earning a degree behind bars is only the first step toward rebuilding their lives. But without stable housing, the rest becomes nearly impossible. For Gonzalez, Hudson Link’s housing allowed him to get an ID, find employment, and build a foundation — tasks that would have been extremely difficult without a permanent address.

And the need for such support is growing. With the return of Pell Grants for incarcerated students in 2023, the number of people coming home with college degrees is expected to increase, according to Ruth Delaney, director of Vera Institute's Unlocking Potential initiative. Recognizing that housing underpins successful reentry, some prison education programs are expanding to provide their alumni with a place to live alongside job assistance and other support.

In New York, Hudson Link, which has offered college courses in prisons for more than 25 years, now operates reentry housing that provides rent-free accommodation and wraparound services to help its alumni rebuild their lives. In California, several campuses of the California State University system have opened dedicated housing for formerly incarcerated students. Thousands of miles east, the Tennessee Higher Education Initiative opened three houses in the Nashville area in 2024.

Formerly incarcerated people are 10 times more likely than the general population to be homeless, due to factors including scarcity of affordable housing, public housing bans for certain criminal records, employment barriers, and rental policies that bar people with criminal records. For formerly incarcerated college students specifically, 36% experience homelessness.

More than two decades ago, when Sean Pica was a student in the same program he now leads, he wrote his capstone project on a manual typewriter while incarcerated at Sing Sing. It was a research proposal for using formerly incarcerated people to rehabilitate dilapidated homes in impoverished communities.

Years later, Pica had that yellowed capstone sitting on his desk when a donor stopped by. The different fonts from the manual typewriter caught her eye. When Pica explained he'd written it 19 years earlier while living in Sing Sing, she wrote a check for $500,000 on the spot.

"We bought a house before we even planned it," Pica says.

More and more Hudson Link alumni were coming home, and Pica saw a gap: "New York has a tremendous amount of incredible reentry support, but not reentry support for formerly incarcerated college educated people."

Read the full story. 

Related coverage: What it’s like to graduate behind bars

‘They ban books by Black authors. Then they tell us to celebrate Black History Month.’

Kwaneta Harris writes about the reality of censorship in a Texas women’s prison during Black History Month.

The state asks us to celebrate Black History Month within these concrete walls, yet their very education system perpetuates erasure. In the high school readiness programs offered in Texas prisons, textbooks still cling to the sanitized narrative that the Civil War was merely about “states’ rights.” The same texts refer to enslaved people as “migrant workers,” a calculated distortion that obscures the brutal reality of chattel slavery. 

While recent headlines focus on the dismantling of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives across America’s higher education system, such erasure of diverse perspectives is nothing new behind prison walls. As state legislatures and boards of regents debate whose histories deserve telling, those of us behind bars have long faced explicit bans on texts that challenge dominant narratives or examine racial and gender justice. 

As an incarcerated Black woman, the hypocrisy is particularly stark. The “celebration” of Black History Month entails posters of MLK, George Washington Carver, and Rosa Parks plastered around the education building. The display in the library has lots of kente cloth borders and a table with self-help and religious books by “safe” Black authors. 

This is the same prison library that bans works by Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, bell hooks and other Black female intellectuals under the guise of preventing “critical race theory indoctrination.” The selective censorship of Black feminist authors reflects the system’s fear of Black women who speak their truths. 

Read Kwaneta’s full essay. 

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.

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