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

Short on time? Here are the highlights:

• This week, we look at the emergence of state coalitions for higher education in prison at a conference organized by the Colorado Coalition for Higher Education in prison. 

• Our local network partner, WBEZ, published a version of my story on a new report about earned time. 

How do you get everyone on the same page?

On a Friday afternoon in late January, directors of prison education programs, state higher education officials, corrections administrators, and nonprofit leaders gathered in Denver to discuss a challenge facing colleges working in prisons across the country: How do you get everyone on the same page?

The Colorado Coalition for Higher Education in Prison organized the conference with support from ECMC Foundation, bringing together experts from New Jersey, Tennessee, Texas, Florida, Wisconsin, and other states to share strategies for building effective statewide coordination. As prison education programs have expanded following Pell Grant restoration in 2023, states are racing to build the infrastructure needed to coordinate multiple institutions, navigate complex funding streams, and remove policy barriers.

That infrastructure is becoming a competitive advantage—and it’s absence can create problems. Students lose credits when transferred between facilities if colleges don’t coordinate and employment barriers persist when agencies don’t align on certification requirements. Individual colleges working alone also often lack leverage to address systematic issues with departments of correction or influence policy—problems that require collective action.

When Jobs for the Future's Fair Chance to Advance initiative announced funding for State Action Networks in January, 31 states applied. The organization selected four: Oregon, Kansas, North Carolina, and Maine. Each state will receive funding, facilitation services, and technical assistance to expand postsecondary opportunities and remove policy barriers.

Rebecca Villareal, senior director at Jobs for the Future's Center for Justice & Economic Advancement, said states with active coalitions stood out in the selection process.

"The states that were most competitive and … most ready for systems change could point to active consortia that have a clear governance structure," Villareal said. "There are strong relationships and working collaborations within the institutions in those consortia. And so that certainly sets states [that are] really thinking about ecosystem coordination apart."

Villareal said the most successful model often has an external organization serving as the neutral convener rather than a single college or university taking charge. When individual institutions lead, there's a risk that conflicts of interest can emerge around enrollment, funding, and credit transfer. A nonprofit can ensure all participating institutions benefit equally.

In Texas, Alexa Garza founded the Texas Center for Higher Education in Prison to serve that neutral convening role. The Center brings together stakeholders who weren't previously communicating with one another across a large, decentralized state. Since 2023, Texas has grown from 11 to 25 colleges offering prison education programs, with about 2,700 students enrolled, she said. But the Center is still building basic infrastructure — hiring staff, establishing its nonprofit status, creating bylaws — while navigating complex dynamics between colleges and state agencies and other organizations.

Sean Mueller, a recent graduate of University of Colorado Denver who began his degree while incarcerated, conducted research on coalition development across two dozen states for the Colorado coalition. He said success comes down to priorities: "Getting all the groups that deliver that education together and getting everybody to play in the sandbox together is just crucial, with the understanding that it's not just about who controls what, but putting the student first.”

Mueller's research also found that larger states face greater challenges establishing and maintaining coalitions due to more facilities and stakeholders. Budget concerns and territorial issues over resources remain persistent challenges, he said.

Villareal also noted that collective advocacy carries more weight with policymakers and departments of correction than individual institutions working alone.

New Jersey offers an example of what mature coalition infrastructure looks like. Chris Agans leads New Jersey Scholarship and Transformative Education in Prisons, known as NJ-STEP, which has woven together multiple institutions under different funding models into a coordinated statewide system.

The state offers an associate's degree program run entirely on Pell funding at scale across all New Jersey prisons. Because it's the same degree statewide, students can transfer between facilities without losing credits. Bachelor's degree programs supplement Pell funding with private and state money. Master's programs use a combined class model, bringing outside students into prison classrooms at a 2-to-1 ratio. he outside students' tuition covers the cost of delivery, Agans said during a panel.

Private institutions like Princeton don't matriculate students but contribute technology, research fellowships, and curriculum development to the collective effort.

The model works because New Jersey's Department of Corrections has strong central authority that allows coalition members to negotiate moving students between facilities and allocating classroom space to maintain the right balance of enrollments across different degree levels.

Colorado's coalition brings together six public colleges and universities, two private institutions, state agencies including the Department of Corrections and Department of Higher Education, and community organizations focused on reentry support and advocacy. One of the policy issues the coalition is tackling is extending the Colorado Opportunity Fund, state-level financial aid, to incarcerated students. Members of the coalition are working with state lawmakers and recently met with Gov. Jared Polis to discuss higher education in prison funding.

In early February, State Rep. Matthew Martinez (D - District 62) introduced a bill to create a working group focused on Colorado Opportunity Fund eligibility. The state financial aid program supplements Pell grants, but extending it to incarcerated students requires solving a state funding formula problem.

The working group will bring together prison education providers, the state Department of Higher Education and other stakeholders to develop recommendations for implementation. If the working group delivers recommendations by December, he plans to sponsor a bill extending the state financial aid to incarcerated students in January 2027, Martinez told Open Campus.

Molly Lasagna, senior strategy officer at Ascendium, pointed to a strategic shift among some funders at the conference. Speaking about Ascendium's approach, she emphasized focusing resources on states with political support for prison education rather than trying to work everywhere.

"Because of where we are right now with our administration, for the next several years our best approach is to try to really double down in the states where there is state-level support, and try to pour as much money and resources and attention into the states where we feel like there's bold action and political cover," Lasagna said.

Several patterns emerged from the Colorado gathering. Successful coalitions coordinate across sectors, bringing together colleges, state agencies, departments of correction, community organizations, and people with lived experience. Colleges alone can't address the barriers formerly incarcerated students face around employment, education, housing, and collateral consequences. Credit transfer policies and financial aid eligibility similarly require coordination across agencies, experts said.

Lasagna said stakeholders need to come together to address state-level barriers like certification and licensure requirements. "There's no way for us to address those unless we're talking about a coordinated approach at the state level," she said, "which means state agencies talking to each other, sharing data with each other, and looking in the same direction."

Ascendium is a financial supporter of Open Campus. Read our editorial independence policy here).

New & views

This section is written by Vee Santoscoy, an Open Campus editorial assistant supported by the Humanities Institute at the University of California Santa Cruz.

Lawmakers are re-introducing The Prison Libraries Act, a federal bill that would create a Department of Justice grant program to expand and strengthen prison library services, aiming to increase educational opportunities, support reintegration, and reduce recidivism for people who are incarcerated. The bill has broad support from organizations such as the American Library Association, crediting the potential benefits of expanded access to books, digital tools, and skills training for incarcerated individuals.

Following the release of the 2025 documentary The Alabama Solution, the incarcerated activists — who provided cell phone footage from inside their facilities for the film — Raoul Poole, Robert Earl Council, and Melvin Ray have been reportedly taken from their facilities and transferred to an extreme solitary confinement unit in Kilby Correctional Facility, where they have been held since mid-January, according to The Appeal. The Alabama Solution is now streaming on Amazon Prime, HBO Max and Hulu.

Additional coverage on an Ohio bill from our local partner newsroom, Signal Cleveland, examines proposed legislation that could end college and career-technical education programs in the state’s higher-security state prisons, a move that could significantly reduce educational access for incarcerated people. In a recent op-ed from the Columbus Dispatch, guest columnist and assistant professor of social work and faculty in the Prison Education Program at Wilmington College, Laura Mishne Heller questions the intent of the bill: “By pairing harsher penalties with the removal of educational opportunities, the bill conflates accountability and rehabilitation into a single response, raising serious questions about safety and effectiveness.”

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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