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

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

• This week, Charlotte West talks to Constance Steinkuehler, a researcher at University of California Irvine who studies the cognitive and social aspects of gaming. They discuss why game tables may be among the few places in prison where racial divisions begin to break down.

• Our Q&A with Reiko Hillyer, a historian at Lewis & Clark College, about a new documentary about the Inside-Out program was co-published with Slate.

• Check out our latest print issue of College Inside focused on Illinois, produced in partnership with our partner WBEZ’s Prisoncast!.

In January 2026, the Illinois Department of Corrections issued a memo about Magic: The Gathering, a collectible fantasy card game. The rules were specific: no more than 500 cards per person, cards must fit in personal property boxes, and no protective sleeves or cases were allowed. But aside from the rules governing the possession of cards, the memo also noted, in its opening line, that the department recognized the game’s “mental-health and social benefits” and its “positive contribution to a facility environment.”

It was a formal acknowledgment of something incarcerated people have long known: games are not only a way to pass the time, but a way to build relationships. And educators and researchers are also increasingly viewing games as more than recreation. Like the prison classroom, game tables can create low-stakes environments where people learn to navigate challenges, build relationships, and work through disagreement. In places where prison life remains deeply segregated along racial lines, they can also bring together people who might otherwise never interact.

That potential reaches people who may carry years of negative experiences with school and learning. Many incarcerated people have limited educational attainment. In California, people in prison read at an eighth-grade level on average and have sixth-grade math skills, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.

Prisons in the United States are also deeply racially segregated. Incarcerated people are often sorted by race from the moment they arrive, assigned to housing along color lines enforced by both formal policy and the unwritten codes that govern life inside. People self-segregate too — at meals, on the yard, in the cells. The game table, along with the prison classroom, is one of the few spaces where those rules don’t apply.

San Quentin SkunkWorks, a nonprofit led by currently and formerly incarcerated people at San Quentin Rehabilitation Center in California, started from a simple observation. In a facility where showers, dining tables, and yard space were all racially segregated, the game tables weren’t. The organization built a formal program around that insight — what they call “transformative recreation.” Once a month, the gym opens for a half-day of tabletop and digital games, open to anyone who wants to play, with one rule: you play with whoever is there. Demand for the program significantly outweighs the number of available seats, organizers said during a recent webinar.

The connections made during game play extend beyond the game table. SkunkWorks organizers have observed men who met playing chess or Dungeons & Dragons later choosing each other as cellmates, across racial lines — something that would be, as one organizer put it, unthinkable in most prisons.

Constance Steinkuehler, a professor of informatics at University of California Irvine who has spent her career studying the cognitive and social benefits of games, first heard about the program through a stream of handwritten letters from incarcerated members of SkunkWorks who had tracked her down through an academic database. They asked for her help. She visited San Quentin to see what they were doing for herself and is now helping the team design and conduct a rigorous academic study of the program’s impact. The research is being conducted in part by incarcerated members of the organization, whom Steinkuehler has been training in survey methodology and study design through a correspondence course conducted largely by mail. As a result of her experience at San Quentin, she also started teaching inside a prison in Southern California as part of UC Irvine’s prison education program.

The study is designed to measure whether attending the gaming program reduces intergroup anxiety — the unease people feel around those from different racial or social groups — and increases feelings of social connection. Participants are randomly selected from a pool of sign-ups, allowing researchers to compare those who attended with those who are still waiting to get in. Early findings, based on a preliminary survey, are promising: participants report feeling less anxious around people from other groups after attending, and more connected to others in the facility. Steinkuehler is also tracking whether those effects persist over time and whether they extend into daily life at San Quentin.

Steinkuehler has a theory about why: Games meet people where they are. The challenge is built into the structure, and the consequences of losing are contained. “No one’s there evaluating you, no one’s judging,” she said.

That’s not a small thing for people who often carry what Steinkuehler calls “damaging messaging” about formal education — the idea, absorbed young and rarely questioned, that they are not learners. In her own research on game-based learning, she has found that struggling readers will work through their own comprehension problems on the fly when they are reading something they actually care about. The same principle applies at the game table. People push through difficult problems because they want to see what happens next.

But the benefits of gaming may extend beyond individual learning. Steinkuehler argues that games also build interpersonal skills that translate beyond the game table. She describes watching incarcerated people get frustrated during a game — and then laugh it off, repair the moment, and move on. That friction and repair, witnessed by everyone at the table, is how trust actually gets built. “Trust doesn’t emerge from no conflict,” she said. “Trust emerges from these everyday frictions and repairs, where you realize you can sort of have a different opinion from someone, and still you can get along.”

Steinkuehler got to test that theory firsthand when she taught a sociology of games class at Donovan Prison in Southern California as part of UC Irvine’s prison education program. She had the men play games during class while others took ethnographic field notes — then used those observations as the basis for assignments, asking students to analyze what they saw using the social theory they were reading. The assignments were sharp. But when the course evaluations came back, most of the long responses weren’t about the coursework at all. They were about what it felt like to sit at a table in prison and feel safe. “I had students that wrote…that they hadn’t had that feeling since they had walked inside the prison doors,” Steinkuehler said.

The prison classroom, it turns out, works similarly. A 2025 study by UC Berkeley researchers found that students in a college program at San Quentin reported more cross-racial friendships and more positive racial attitudes the longer they were enrolled. Like the game table, the classroom offers what the researchers called a “contrasting context”: a space where the racial codes governing the rest of prison life are, at least temporarily, suspended.

Nowhere are those racial codes more entrenched — and the absence of formal programming more stark — than on death row. Keri Blakinger, an investigative journalist who spent years reporting a Pulitzer-nominated story on Dungeons & Dragons on Texas death row, found that men in near-total isolation were forging genuine friendships across racial lines through a game involving wizards and orcs.

In her reporting, Blakinger found that D&D games on death row brought together men who would never have associated otherwise. “Even in prisons where social groups tended to be racially segregated, D&D games often brought together different races,” she said.

Tony Ford, one of the men she followed most closely, was the only Black man playing with a group of Mexican Mafia members when he first got involved in the game in the 1990s. Years later, his closest friend on death row — a white man from deep East Texas named Billy Wardlow — came to the game as the only white player in a group of Black men. Ford told Blakinger that death row is less racially segregated now than it once was. Back then, he said, that kind of integration was a big deal.

The game was also doing something that no formal program on death row did — because there were none. Men sentenced to death in Texas receive none of the educational or mental health programming available to the general prison population. For Ford and Wardlow’s group, D&D became, as Blakinger put it, their “life-skills course, anger-management class and drug counseling” rolled into one. Players would sometimes create characters whose struggles mirrored their own — a character who drank too much, or used drugs — and other players would stage an in-game intervention. “Sometimes that intervention turns real,” Blakinger said, “and they start sharing real-life concerns with their friend who’s struggling.”

Blakinger puts it simply. Men in long-term solitary confinement rarely get to practice the most basic social skills, such as working together or resolving differences. “If you spend all your time in isolation, you can potentially avoid compromising or taking other people’s needs into consideration nearly all the time if you want,” she said. “If you’re engaging in a sustained group activity together, that’s not possible anymore.”

Related coverage:
++ “You need to stop having your pity parties and do the work.” 
++ Job-hunting isn’t easy, especially after prison. San Quentin is trying to change that.

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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