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:

• This week we’re featuring a story about Ron Palm, an incarcerated man who transferred from Illinois to Minnesota to attend Mitchell Hamline School of Law. He’s one of just a few incarcerated students in the country studying law behind bars. The story will be copublished with our local partner, WBEZ Chicago. 

• ICYMI: After the Alabama Department of Corrections banned key staff members from correctional facilities due to alleged security concerns in August, Auburn University suspended its credit-bearing college classes inside, effectively shutting down Alabama’s only prison bachelor's degree program. 

Transfer to Minnesota opens path to law school for Illinois prisoner

For most incarcerated students, a transfer between prisons means disrupted education and even abandoned degrees. 

But for Ronald Palm, a transfer from the Illinois Department of Corrections to Minnesota meant just the opposite: an unprecedented opportunity to attend law school while he was still locked up.

Palm, who was sentenced to 30 years at the age of 17, now attends Mitchell Hamline School of Law remotely from a prison in Faribault, Minnesota, about an hour south of Minneapolis. He is among a small group of incarcerated scholars pursuing law degrees at Mitchell Hamline, which says it’s the first law school in the country to allow students to study from prison.

Palm started his college education at Danville Correctional Center, through the Education Justice Project at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He graduated summa cum laude from Eastern Illinois University in 2023 before his transfer to Minnesota last summer to join the Prison to Law Pipeline initiative launched by Minneapolis-based nonprofit law firm the Legal Revolution.

Palm found out about the program after he contacted the national organization that administers the LSAT about taking the exam while he was still in prison. He didn’t know about the Legal Revolution – or the possibility of actually attending law school while still incarcerated – until someone at the council forwarded his letter to the organization, he told Open Campus. His transfer to Minnesota was contingent on him being accepted to Mitchell Hamline. 

The Legal Revolution sent him study materials, he said, but the hardest part of the process was studying for the LSAT in the chaotic prison environment. He sought refuge by studying in the Education Justice Project’s library at Danville. The program’s tutors also helped him study for the LSAT and review his practice exams. 

Since Palm started law school, several more students at Danville have expressed interest in taking the LSAT or GRE, said Andrea Miller, a psychology professor at UIUC who volunteers with the Education Justice Project at the prison. As a result, the program is developing a summer reading group that focuses on identifying career interests and preparing incarcerated men for law school and graduate school.

The law program at Mitchell Hamline began in 2022 when the American Bar Association granted the law school permission to allow students to attend classes virtually. Maureen Onyelobi and Jeff Young were the program’s first two students. “It’s so fitting that someone who’s actually been incarcerated and who could actually relate to what their clients are going through can actually earn a law degree,” Onyelobi told Open Campus right after she found out she had been accepted to Mitchell Hamline. 

Onyelobi's legal education likely played a role in a 2023 decision by the Minnesota parole board to reduce her sentence from life without parole to life with the possibility of parole, the Minnesota Star Tribune reported. 

The program also works with North Hennepin Community College, located outside of Minneapolis, to offer a paralegal certificate to incarcerated students.

Palm is now in his second semester. He has a tablet that allows him to conduct legal research and to email professors with questions, and he studies via Zoom in real time alongside law students who are on campus in Minneapolis. He recently presented his first oral arguments for his legal writing class, while his classmates stood at a lectern at the front of the classroom. 

"It is like I have a seat in class, only I'm on the screen," he said. 

The Legal Revolution covers his tuition, with Mitchell Hamline also providing a scholarship, Palm said. This summer, he will participate in an externship focused on pardons and commutations with the law firm. 

"I am excited to get some actual practice under my belt," Palm said.

The Legal Revolution also works in partnership with the Law School Admission Council to administer LSAT exams in prisons across multiple states, with 16 students in Minnesota, Illinois, North Carolina, Louisiana, Connecticut and Florida taking the LSAT over the last academic year. 

In recent years, a handful of formerly incarcerated people have started law school in Illinois. Last year, Benard McKinley became the first person in Illinois to take the LSAT from prison. A graduate of the Northwestern Prison Education Program, he’s now a first-year law student at the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law.  

Palm, who has served 22 years of his sentence, could be eligible for work release in about five years. At that point, he may be able to take the bar exam, although some states prevent people with criminal histories from becoming attorneys. 

In Illinois, people with felony convictions are allowed to take the bar exam, but must first be certified as having “good moral character and fitness to practice law” by a special committee, according to the Illinois Board of Admissions to the Bar. It’s unclear if someone would be allowed to take the bar exam while still in custody. 

But Palm remains optimistic about the impact that attorneys who’ve been in prison themselves can have on the legal profession. 

"I think we can have a tremendous effect on reforming the justice system," he said. "A lot of the time, we are portrayed as people who are just beyond redemption. But the truth is that some of us just [weren’t] given the chance to excel."

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.

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