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, I wrote about my visit in June to a sociology class about forgiveness at the California Institution for Women, co-published with Slate. 

• Vote for us! College Inside submitted a proposal to SxSWEdu, along with the Prison Journalism Project, to do a session on journalism training as a way to promote literacy and job readiness behind bars. I’m also the moderator for a SxSW session on AI in prison education. Your vote counts for 30% of the panel selection process, so please show your support by Aug. 18. 

• Emma Folts, the higher ed reporter for our local partner PublicSource, covered the slow rollout of Pell-funded prison education programs in Pittsburgh, while Claire Rafford wrote about a reentry fair at Martin University for our local partner Mirror Indy. 

• ICYMI: Jesse Carson wrote a first-person essay wondering if his prison education program was worth it.

What happens when incarcerated women study forgiveness

“Is there a right way to forgive?” Lety Z. Montoya wondered outloud. “If I don’t feel these positive things that come after, did I do it wrong? Did I not mean it?”

A few of her classmates nodded their heads. “Thank you for saying that,” said Kristen Discola, a sociology professor at California State University Los Angeles. “People often think that it would be a betrayal of their brother, their mother, their son if they allowed themselves to forgive.”

Discola studies forgiveness among individuals who lost loved ones to homicide. Her research looks at what factors lead people to forgive—or not—those who killed their friends and relatives.  

Forgiveness is a topic that this particular group of students grapple with often. 

Collectively, the 23 women enrolled in Discola’s course have spent hundreds of years in prison. Many were convicted of violent crimes, which is why Discola’s research resonates with them so much. They see the relevance of her work for their victims and themselves. 

“Studying forgiveness gives me hope for myself and for the survivors of my crime,” one student, who asked not to be named because she didn’t want to retraumatize her victims, said from the back of the classroom. “Just because they are not forgiving me, it doesn’t mean that they are stuck in a life of trauma.”

Exploring forgiveness through an academic lens helps the women examine their own experiences of causing harm and being harmed. By studying societal and theoretical views of the topic, they confront their own histories.  

An emotional transformation

Every Monday evening in June and July, Discola drove through rush hour traffic to the California Institution for Women in Chino. The sociology course is part of a liberal-studies degree offered through Cal State LA—one of the two bachelor’s programs available to women in the state’s prison system. 

For Discola, forgiveness is not an emotion, but rather a process of emotional transformation. It looks different for everyone. Some people never forgive their perpetrators and continue to harbor anger or a desire for revenge, a concept Discola calls “unforgiveness.” For others, it might mean letting go of negative emotions like hatred but still wanting to see someone held accountable—that is, a kind of “forgive but don’t forget.” Other people might eventually get to a place where they can even extend empathy and goodwill towards someone who caused them harm.

Those are distinctions that Discola’s students understand almost intuitively, but the class provides an opportunity to put their own experience into a broader context and gives them a vocabulary to describe it. 

Discola said that some people might mistakenly equate forgiveness with condoning the act itself. She describes how one student, who killed her ex-husband, found this insight particularly helpful in understanding her children’s difficulty forgiving her.

Many of the students are also focused on the potential for those affected by their crimes to find inner peace and healing through forgiveness, Discola said.

Read the rest of the story.

How we did this story

Journalists spend a lot of time thinking about words, and which words we should use and which ones we shouldn’t. 

This story we just published on the sociology of forgiveness is a little different than some of our other prison education coverage. For one, you’ll notice that we decided to include charges of the individuals we featured, which we don’t do in all of our stories. We made the decision to mention them because it’s really hard to talk about forgiveness if we don’t know why someone is in prison. We talked to the women who were sharing their stories ahead of publication to let them know what details we were including so no one was surprised when they saw the final story. 

Some newsrooms will always include charges as a matter of policy. It helps increase transparency and criminal convictions are already a matter of public record — and the readers are going to want to know. 

Brendan Kiley did a great job of summing up this conundrum in this recent piece for the Seattle Times on the first incarcerated women in Washington state to earn a bachelor’s degree: 

There are other considerations as well. People in prison don’t necessarily have the same digital footprint as the rest of us. If they have been inside for decades, their charges might not be the first thing the Google algorithm picks up. 

Our policy is this: does including more details about why someone is in prison advance the story we’re trying to tell? And how do we do that in a sensitive, not salacious, way?

Although financial aid is back, few Pa. colleges are stepping up to offer prison education

A year after eligibility for Pell Grants was reinstated for people in prisons, opportunities for college degrees are still rare for incarcerated Pennsylvanians. While some degree programs have operated in Pennsylvania for years, none are offered by Pittsburgh-area universities. The Community College of Allegheny County is, so far, the only local institution that has applied this past year to launch a Pell-eligible program, according to the state Department of Corrections. 

The promise of the Pell Grant restoration has, so far, met a slow-moving reality, even though there has historically been significant interest among incarcerated people. Only 140 people incarcerated in Pennsylvania state prisons participated in a Pell-funded program in the last year. Roughly 40,000 people are incarcerated in these facilities.

In the last year, the U.S. Department of Education has approved only one new Pell-eligible program, administered by California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt.

Read the rest of this story by Emma Folts, the higher education reporter for PublicSource, our local partner in Pittsburgh.

Help College Inside go to SxSWEdu! 

It’s not November yet, but it’s time to head to the polls!

Please vote for our SxSWEdu session proposal about journalism training in prison, featuring me, Yukari Kane of the Prison Journalism Project and Lawrence Bartley of The Marshall Project’s News Inside. Our session is called “Journalism Training in Prison Teaches More Than Headlines.” I’m also the moderator for a SxSW panel organized by Stacy Burnett of JSTOR Access in Prison, “GenAI's Breakthrough in Prison Education.” 

Please go to the SxSW PanelPicker, create an account and show your support! Public voting counts for 30% of the selection process. Deadline is Aug 18. 

A GED on North Carolina’s death row

College Inside contributor Lyle C. May, who won best op-ed for the inaugural Stillwater Awards for prison journalism for his essay “Y’all aren’t here to be rehabilitated,” just published an op-ed in NC Newsline about the slow roll out of proposed GED program on North Carolina’s death row.

Nearly a year ago, Gov. Roy Cooper responded to a death row prisoner’s plea for access to a GED program, directing Secretary of Prisons Todd Ishee to make a high school equivalency program available to those housed on death row at Central Prison in Raleigh, May reported.

In the beginning, prison officials expressed enthusiasm and began to secure the necessary books and laptops for GED instruction, and even designated a cell block to be converted into an education center. When a GED sign-up sheet was posted, more than 30 men eagerly put their names on it, May wrote.

Since then, nothing more has happened. May called on NC prison leadership to fulfill Cooper’s order. “For now, the GED program on death row is a dream deferred,” he wrote.

Read the rest of May’s op-ed in NC Newsline.

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.

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