A biweekly newsletter about the intersection of higher education and criminal justice. Written by Open Campus national reporter Charlotte West.

Open Campus has launched its annual year-end fundraising campaign, which supports our higher-education reporting, including College Inside. Donations to Open Campus are being matched up to $1,000 per individual and up to $50,000 in total through December 31. 

For the first time, Open Campus is offering a thank you gift to College Inside subscribers who make a donation of $75 or more. We will send our College Inside supporters a mug printed with an original work titled, “Reaching Back.” Learn more about that piece below.

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Showing the world what life is like inside

This week we asked two incarcerated artists, Juan Hernandez in Illinois and Alvin Smith in Michigan, to create pieces responding to the question:

What does it mean to be inspired inside?

While both Alvin and Juan were sentenced in the immediate aftermath of the 1994 Crime Bill and have been incarcerated for decades, they’ve had different access to educational opportunities inside.

Juan waited for years to even be allowed to take the GED and has remained at the bottom of the education waitlist due to his 45-year sentence. As a lifer, Alvin too was long excluded from education inside until he was finally transferred to a facility where Hope College and Western Theological Seminary jointly offer a bachelor’s degree. He’ll earn his degree in 2025 as part of the program’s first graduating class. 

Here’s how Alvin and Juan describe their pieces, in their own words. Their comments have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

“Doing for Ourselves”

Juan's calls this piece "Doing for Ourselves." It highlights the ways in which incarcerated people take charge of learning and creative expression for themselves and others: 

In a perfect world where systems are built to do what they're meant for, prisons would be equipped with counselors, educators, mental health specialists and other professionals to help incarcerated individuals placed in the carceral system. In a perfect world, the administration would follow through on their mission statements instead of just creating them to hide from the public what's going on behind steel doors. The reality is that we do not live in a perfect world and as an individual who has been incarcerated since childhood, I've come to the realization that we cannot rely on their corrupt system to bring about change in our lives.

In the foreground there's a table with individuals taking part in a study group where we learn, socialize, and trade thoughts to expand our minds. In the background you see three cells that have answered a need in the community. The jailhouse lawyer in Cell #50 has acquired his paralegal certificate and helps individuals with their legal problems. The artist in Cell #51 used art as a tool towards rehabilitation and a platform for prisoners’ rights, among other social issues.

And the man in Cell #52 has created a communal library where anyone in the unit can check a book out any time they wish with no late fees. On the right side of the painting there's a restricted area where we aren't allowed, which happens to have the law library and GED room protected by a sleeping guard. Everything looks calm and collected, but in an imperfect world, chaos can erupt at any moment as made evident by the used shot plate above cell #51 where officers in the catwalk took warning shots to stop an unprovoked incident. In an imperfect world, I am showing that we are still Doing for Ourselves."

More of Juan’s art can be found on his Instagram, @jch_convictedart. We’ve also featured his work here. 

“Reaching Back”

With his piece, “Reaching Back,” Alvin wanted to demonstrate the importance of leaving a legacy for those who come behind: 

As I was sketching the graduate sneakily passing a book to a fellow prisoner in the cell, I started thinking about watching the Olympics, track and field in particular. The focus was on passing the baton forward. I believe that's fine where relay races are concerned. However, that ideology is woefully ineffective for individuals in prison. And so, it makes no difference what you're passing. If no one is moved [forward] to reach back to incarcerated individuals, then we continue to be left behind.

That's why the work that the Urban Ministry Institute, and The Hope-Western Prison Education Program are so near and dear to many of our hearts here in the Michigan Department of Corrections. These programs' strong emphasis on caring for others is what has equipped us to share the knowledge we gain with those of us who still are denied access to higher education in prisons. Most times, it's nothing more than the type of crime they committed that excludes them from getting life changing education.

One of Hope-Western’s slogans that pervade almost every course is that "our education is not merely for ourselves" (which I first heard from former prison education director Dr. Richard Ray). It's become more than just something we say. It's what we demonstrate everyday, in every way, because it's our heart's desire that none get left behind.

More of Alvin’s art can be seen in his portfolio here. We’ve also featured his work here and here.

Related coverage: 

• “The struggle for artistic freedom inside.”

• “An educated prisoner is a dangerous prisoner.”

News and views

For our local partner The Texas Tribune, Sneha Dey visited Texas's only community college class that helps prepare incarcerated Texans to cope with the barriers they might face after prison. More than 250 Texas prisoners are on the waitlist to join the reentry class, offered through Lee College. Formerly and currently incarcerated Texans told the Tribune that comprehensive reentry support is bare bones beyond the Lee College class. The school has proposed teaming up with the TDCJ to launch a pilot project that would deliver podcasts and videos with content from its reentry classes directly to tablets that prisoners can use.

Illinois state lawmakers are at odds over how to curb drugs like fentanyl and synthetic cannabinoids from getting into state prisons, wrote Mawa Iqbal for our local partner WBEZ. A Republican state senator has introduced a bill that would ban all incoming physical mail and would instead require Illinois Department of Corrections facilities to have the mail electronically scanned for people in prisons to access digitally. In response, a coalition of Democratic lawmakers is urging the IDOC not to ban paper mail, saying that physical mail is an important way for those who are incarcerated to stay in contact with loved ones on the outside.

Building on our reporting with WBEZ on the closure of Stateville Correctional Center earlier this fall, Illinois Public Radio education reporter Emily Hays followed-up on the abrupt transfers that occurred following a federal judge’s ruling to empty the facility. The Illinois Department of Corrections told IPR that most of the 109 students enrolled in Stateville’s higher education programs were transferred to a facility where they could continue their education. But educators say that several students were transferred at other facilities across the state. Some of those students told IPR that they have been cut off from their academic community entirely because IDOC policy prevents volunteers, including professors, from communicating by phone, electronic message or letter. 

Last year, Florida created the “Florida Scholars Academy,” a program offering online high school and college classes for students housed in the state’s Department of Juvenile Justice facilities. A recent investigation by the Florida Phoenix found that kids in juvenile detention facilities are now using state-provided laptops intended for educational use to post on Instagram, screen movies, and view pornography, according to agency disciplinary reports and people who worked in the system.

The Mackinac Center for Public Policy just released a ranking of state prison education programs, as well as a second report, How States Can Improve Education Programs in Prisons. These reports examine state policies and the return on investment that prison education programs provide, building on a widely cited meta-analysis from 2023. The rankings found that Ohio, California and Wyoming lead the nation in prison education initiatives, while Alaska, Missouri and Montana rank the lowest.

ICYMI: Check out our new Illinois-focused print issue of College Inside, produced in partnership with WBEZ’s Prisoncast! project. You can also find the latest quarterly issue we sent out to our incarcerated readers last week.

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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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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