- College Inside
- Posts
- Three experts weigh in on what a new president will mean for prison education
Three experts weigh in on what a new president will mean for prison education
Charlotte West
October 25, 2024
Incarcerated students at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in New York State. Babita Patel/Open Campus
Prison education hasn’t exactly been a talking point of the presidential election this year. That’s where we come in.
A big question is what the new administration will mean for the return of Pell Grants for incarcerated students, who once again became eligible for the federal financial aid in July 2023 for the first time in nearly 30 years. The implementation process for new prison education programs by the federal Education Department has been slow, with only a handful of colleges being approved more than a year after Pell Grants returned.
Neither Kamala Harris nor Donald Trump have publicly announced any proposals to address this. But their overall education policies hold some clues.
On the Democratic ticket, Harris has long been an advocate for prison education and raising the amount of the Pell Grant award. And vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, and his wife Gwen, made prison education a distinctive feature of their governorship in Minnesota.
On the other hand, despite signing the legislation that ultimately brought Pell back to prisons and doubling the number of Second Chance Pell sites, Trump repeatedly proposed massive cuts to student aid and is calling for the elimination of the Department of Education.
We asked three experts on prison education what they thought the new administration would mean for prison education. These interviews have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Dan Karpowitz is the undersecretary for criminal justice policy and planning in Connecticut. He was a cofounder of the Bard Prison Initiative’s Consortium for the Liberal Arts in Prison and lecturer in law and humanities at Bard College. He recently served as the assistant commissioner for policy at the Minnesota Department of Corrections and special advisor to Gov. Tim Walz on criminal justice and education.
What does it mean to have a vice presidential candidate and his wife, both former public school teachers, who have been so outspoken in support of prison education? What are the implications for prison education nationally?
I would say this: When Tim and Gwen were inaugurated on the steps of the state capitol in Saint Paul in January 2019, I knew I had made the right decision to move my wife and children to Minnesota. Their invitees were every single teacher both of them had ever had that was still alive, from nursery school to grad school. If they take that spirit and bring that into their work in the federal government, it's super exciting.
In Minnesota, they had a vision of systems change in higher education and in prisons. The Walz administration [created interagency positions like mine] to knit things across the Minnesota Office of Higher Education and the Department of Corrections. I was tasked with transforming higher education in Minnesota by catalyzing change within tertiary education and correctional spaces by seeing people in prison as an essential student body.
What that means in terms of Pell policy, …I don't know. There's a very complicated education agenda with student debt, the FAFSA, etc. But I trust them to just be who they are. They understand that the transformation of a person happens with systems change. They have a very full plate, but I'm very optimistic about who they are and what they'd bring to Washington.
Kyle Southern is the associate vice president for higher education quality at the Institute for College Access and Success, also known as TICAS, an independent advocacy organization focused on affordability, accountability, and equity in higher education.
What will the election mean for prison education?
It’s heartening that we've seen a lot of bipartisan support for expanding access to higher education opportunities for incarcerated folks. From what I've read about higher ed more broadly in terms of the campaigns, I've seen everyone talking about the need for a better workforce and making sure that folks who are coming back to the free world have been equipped with the skills and knowledge to get good jobs. We know the impact that has in reducing recidivism.
Vice President Harris has expressed her support [for prison education], and I expect that to continue. And similarly, if Donald Trump were to return, he's one who signed [the FAFSA Simplification Act] into law. So I would hope that his administration would be invested in prison education as well…I want to be optimistic that, regardless of what the voters decide in November, that whatever administration takes office will be invested in and continue the progress on this front.
Trump has said on several occasions that he wants to abolish the Education Department. How would that impact prison education?
I'm not much of a gambler, but if I was, I would bet you that in four years, we will have a Department of Education. We have seen the current department [under Biden] spanning a lot of issue areas and not getting the support they need from Congress in terms of a budget allocation to implement a lot of the really important policy directives, including student loan servicing and FAFSA. Pell is another. We've seen the backlog in processing applications to start new prison education programs. I think there have only been a handful that have gotten through that process.
An ongoing challenge, regardless of administration, is the positioning of state corrections departments and the Bureau of Prisons as arbiters of quality of higher education. We just had 30 years of being in the previous situation without access to Pell and the diminution of opportunity that that brought. So this is not just an Education Department challenge. It's a real complex web of how to engage corrections departments, accreditors, federal facilities and the BOP. There's a real need for White House leadership to think about how we ensure high quality programs are being provided.
Is there anything else that you've been thinking about prison education given the upcoming election?
We can never tell this story without centering the racial equity implications of it, and to look at the disproportionate impact of incarceration on people of color, particularly men of color. So any investment in high-quality education for folks who are incarcerated is an investment in a more equitable society…It's also important to think about it from a gender perspective. There's been far too little coverage of the dearth of opportunity for women who are incarcerated.
Then the last thing that I've been troubled by is the story of the Georgia State program and their retreat from this space. My hope is that as we move forward with implementing these [Pell] regulations, that they will not be used as a cover to retreat from these investments, but rather they should be a signal that it's incumbent on all of higher ed, regardless of sector, to say that here's a population of over 700,000 people who can and should have access to high quality higher education.
Gerard Robinson is a professor of practice in public policy and law at the University of Virginia. From 2017 to 2020, Robinson was executive director of the Center for Advancing Opportunity, a Washington, D.C.-based research and education initiative. Previously he served as commissioner of education for Florida and secretary of education for Virginia.
What will the election mean for prison education?
If Trump is elected, he's already shown that he was willing to double the number of programs that were in the Second Chance Pell experimental sites. …If Harris is elected, she would do the same thing. She's got enough examples in her own backyard that she can use to say, ‘It worked in California.’ So I can see both of them supporting the continuation of what used to be Second Chance Pell.
Moving forward, I think the challenge that both of them will have is what we've seen over the last several years is the fact that we've only had [a few schools] approved to be new members in the Pell Grant program.
Both of them have a unique challenge in that, in some ways, they are seen as sheriffs becoming presidents. When she was attorney general [in California], Harris had a tough-on-crime record, and now she's saying ‘I want to give people a second chance.’ Trump ran tough on crime. He became president, opened up some more doors [though the First Step Act and the FAFSA Simplification Act], but people still see both of them as a sheriff, [despite] different politics, different parties.
But at some point people are going to wonder if they are going to be a new sheriff in town and still be strong on prison education, or if they are going to be the new sheriff in town and want some accountability. I don't know which way they're going to go with that one. I think it's a bigger issue about crime control, because you can't talk about prison education without talking about your philosophy on crime.
Is there anything else you’re thinking about in terms of what a new administration will mean for prison education?
It'll be interesting to see who they select as secretary of education. So the current secretary of ed, Miguel Cardona, is very supportive of it. I think he's the first sitting secretary of ed to talk about how he wanted to make this his number one commitment. So will the Trump secretary of ed, or the Harris secretary of ed, make a bold statement like that? We'll find out.
The second thing I want to look at is if Trump says he wants to close the Department of Education, and he still wants to keep prison education moving forward, does that mean the Department of Justice will take over? It’s got its own set of challenges.
The third thing is how can we better utilize correctional education in general? Because one thing that concerns me is that when we talk about prison education, it's primarily higher ed. That's partially because the Second Chance Pell initiative was the new thing in town. It got a lot of support, but the majority of people [enrolled in correctional education] are involved with adult basic education. And so I'd like to hear more about that aspect of prison education, not just the higher education part.
What we’re reading
Last week, The Marshall Project dropped the results of their 2024 election survey, which included questions on what incarcerated people really think about electoral battle between “the cop vs. the felon.” They also asked people behind bars about their political leanings, which yielded some surprising insights. (We’re also 😮 at this new report from The Sentencing Project, which found that 4 million people in the United States are disenfranchised because of a felony).
Also check out this piece about a formerly incarcerated man in Philadelphia who is teaching people in his community about employment in the clean energy. A lot of people don’t even know these jobs exist, he told the Associated Press.
Finally, we stumbled across this book by Jason A. Higgins, a historian at Virginia Tech who studies veterans and mass incarceration. The book, Prisoners after War, is available for free thanks to a grant Higgins received to make it open access. Related: “This Vietnam vet made education his mission.”
What we’re listening to
Sixteen-year-old Eden Alonso-Rivera won NPR's Student Podcast Challenge for a podcast she created using a bundle of letters and sketches her father had sent from jail. Her submission, called A Relationship Behind Bars, beat out nearly 2,000 other entries. Related: “With an incarcerated parent, pursuing a law degree was the natural choice.”
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.
Know others that are interested in higher ed in prisons? Let them know about the newsletter. Thanks!
You currently have 0 referrals, only 2 away from receiving a Twitter Shoutout.
Or copy and paste this link to others: https://college-inside.beehiiv.com/subscribe?ref=2p6y6raqDY