research on prison education

Higher Education in Prison Research

A digital space centered around the creation of a robust, ethical, and sustainable higher education in prison research infrastructure..

• • Introduction
• • Debt and Incarceration
• • Abolition Labor Project
• • Family Debt Project
• • Cars and Jails Project
• • Cost of Commissary
• • Cost of COVID
• • Community Relations
• • Timeline of Lab Publications
• • Research Team

The Prison Education Program Research Lab   is a collaborative effort between faculty and students at NYU Prison Education Program.

The lab documents the financial and human costs of incarceration to amplify the knowledge and expertise of individuals and communities directly impacted by mass incarceration..

• Right now we’re a small community of peer researchers doing this work, and I feel great that we’re the trailblazers, we started this incarceration research for ourselves, but it’s going to go past us. Hopefully, this research will lead to change in New York state prisons, whether they look more into the commissary costs, or child support, or the fines and fees and other penalties, like parole, that come with being incarcerated. —Vincent Thomas, Peer Researcher
• Like Vincent, I hope it changes the stigma around incarceration, and that will in turn cause people to want to help. I just want to create a truth so people know what’s really happening, because the media and TV shows don’t tell it like it is. —Derick McCarthy, Peer Researcher
• I like the idea of equipping those who are impacted by mass incarceration with the tools to study the issues around it, as opposed to having people from the outside come in and study our communities, because they struggle to understand what it’s like to experience the things that we live through. —Mychal Pagan, Peer Researcher
• They call it a sentence because it's only one line out of a paragraph, not the whole story of your life. The prison isn’t really taking full care of you; people on the outside are taking care of you, if you’re fortunate enough to have them. Or you’re doing some extra things to take care of yourself. —Aiyuba Thomas, Peer Researcher

Right now we’re a small community of peer researchers doing this work, and I feel great that we’re the trailblazers, we started this incarceration research for ourselves, but it’s going to go past us. Hopefully, this research will lead to change in New York state prisons, whether they look more into the commissary costs, or child support, or the fines and fees and other penalties, like parole, that come with being incarcerated.

—Vincent Thomas, Peer Researcher

Research team.

Jump to the Research team section

Current Projects

Family Debt Project : We are currently working on a study of how families and communities are brought into the penal state and shaped by their relationship to it. The project analyzes the many forms of financial support families and communities provide–from commissary costs to telecommunication expenses to legal fees to child support. Based on a survey of over 500 New Yorkers who support loved ones in prison, and 200 qualitative interviews with a subsample of them, we document the stream of resources flowing from kin networks into penal institutions and its reciprocal effects on family and community life.

Abolition Labor Project

Cars and Jails Project

Cost of Commissary

Tamiment Library

Timeline of Publications

Lab Achievements

The first book, Cars and Jails: Freedom Dreams, Debt and Carcerality , published in 2022, explores all of the ways in which car ownership and use can lead to detention. In particular, it shows how the (auto) debt economy overlaps with the carceral economy.

The second book, Abolition Labor: The Fight to End Prison Slavery , published in 2024, draws heavily on the prison work experience of formerly incarcerated men and women, and chronicles the nationwide campaign to “End the Exception” in the 13th Amendment.

Our articles and opinion essays have appeared in a broad range of publications, from public media like the New York Times , The Guardian , Newsday , and the Boston Review , to scholarly journals, like South Atlantic Quarterly and Marxist Sociology, and revues of critical legal and prison studies, like Inquest and the Law and Political Economy Project. 

Lab students have produced their own visual media projects and podcasts, and have given many public presentations about their work.

Last but not least, we are proud that most of our students and researchers have graduated and found positions in other institutions and organizations.

Community Relations

Current funding:

United States Department of Education, Grant for Community Outreach and Promotion

Institute for Research on Poverty, “Familial Debt and Reentry: Barriers to Child Support Adjudication.”

Pending Funding:

National Science Foundation, REU Site: Research Training for Formerly Incarcerated Undergraduates

Donations for our Research Lab may be made through our parent unit, NYU’s Prison Education Program .

All donations made to our Emergency Funds will  g o directly to our students to support their continued education, and personal wellbeing after incarceration. Donations cover everything from:

• relieving   tuition and  student debt  for formerly incarcerated students to return to college,
• to buying   books and laptops   for college coursework and professional development,
• to providing   metro cards   for recently released students so that they can get to critical appointments,
• to providing   emergency care   (i.e. clothing, food, medical, cell phones) and   stable  housing

Queries?   Email:   [email protected]

The NYU Prison Education Program (PEP) is a college-in-prison program that aims to expand access to higher education within communities impacted by the criminal justice system and to model how a research university can advance solutions to real-world problems. In 2018, NYU PEP formed the Research Lab, a collaboration between faculty and formerly incarcerated students at NYU, to study the costs of incarceration and to generate grounded policy recommendations and advocacy initiatives around responsible decarceration in the city and state. Students with lived experiences of incarceration are hired and trained by faculty members in the methods and ethics of social science research and take part in all aspects of research, including identifying research questions, design, data collection, and dissemination. By drawing on researchers from NYC communities most affected by incarceration, the Research Lab hopes to amplify their voices and concerns and to increase communities’ capacities to respond to the effects of incarceration.

Lab Podcasts

Zach gillespie (pep research lab) talks to briane cornish and gordon davis, president and treasurer of finequity, an organization helping those impacted by incarceration to grow their financial power., nyu prison education program’s peer researchers derick mccarthy and aiyuba thomas talk to akeel adil, owner of rogue optical, about his experience starting a business after incarceration., debt and incarceration.

By Andrew Ross, Tommaso Bardelli, and Aiyuba Thomas

“This is a startling—and often inspiring—account of the pernicious persistence of prison slavery. It is that rare book which will galvanize a reform movement and, therefore, make for a better world.”

—Gerald Horne, author of more than 30 books, including Revolting Capital and The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America

Abolition Labor   is the first full account of the national movement to end forced labor, much of it unpaid, in American prisons. It draws on interviews with formerly incarcerated persons in Alabama, Texas, Georgia and New York to give a more holistic picture of these work conditions, and it covers the new prisoner rights movement that began with system-wide work strikes involving more than 50,000 people in the 2010s.

Incarcerated people   work for penny wages   (15 cents an hour is not unusual), and, in several states, for nothing at all, as cooks, dishwashers, janitors, groundskeepers, barbers, painters, or plumbers; in laundries, kitchens, factories, and hospitals. They provide vital public services such as repairing roads, fighting wildfires, or clearing debris after hurricanes. They manufacture products like office furniture, mattresses, license plates, dentures, glasses, traffic signs, garbage cans, athletic equipment, and uniforms. And they harvest crops, work as welders and carpenters, and labor in meat and poultry processing plants.

Abolition Labor  provides a wealth of insights into what has become a vast underground economy. It draws connections between the risky trade forced on prisoners who hustle to survive on the inside and the precarious economy on the outside. And it argues that, far from being quarantined off from society, prisons and their forced work regime have a sizable impact on the employment market and the economic life of tens of millions of American households.

FAMILY DEBT

Prisons of Debt: The Afterlives of Incarcerated Fathers An ethnographic study of the millions of fathers cycling through the criminal justice and child support systems—and how those cycles lead to inescapable debt and punishment.

By Lynne Haney, 2022

Cars and Jails: Freedom Dreams, Debt and Carcerality

Racism is like a Cadillac, they bring out a new model every year.

— Malcolm X (a former auto worker)

As cornerstones of life under racial capitalism, the automobile and the prison exemplify the ease with which the quotidian can become deadly. Livingston and Ross, with the support of formerly incarcerated peer researchers, have produced an extraordinary example of how critical carceral studies can enlighten, complicate and inspire.

— Angela Y. Davis, author of Are Prisons Obsolete?

I’ve dreamed for years that somebody would write this book. It’s not only a brilliant intervention but a necessary one. Livingston and Ross explore the profound antisociality of automotive life in a society configured by racial hierarchy. They have thoughtfully illuminated the mutual articulation of automotivity and carcerality in provocative ways that have enormous practical value.

— Paul Gilroy , author of The Black Atlantic

A short video on Cars and Jails: Freedom Dreams, Debt, and Carcerality, a new book by Julie Livingston and Andrew Ross.

Car dreams: debt, carcerality and the automobile . a short film by mychal pagan and gabriela azevedo, the cost of commissary.

With wages currently as low as $0.10 per hour , most incarcerated people in New York have to work 3 hours to afford a ramen soup at the commissary store, and 44 hours for a cereal bar .

(Source: NY Focus, April 2023).

Photograph by Mychal Pagan

Beginning in Fall 2019, our team has been conducting research on the costs of commissary and related consumer spending during incarceration. By studying the commissary system, our aim is to trace the flow of money into the prison, its circulation inside, and the fiscal effects on families on the outside. To date, our researchers have conducted qualitative interviews with over 50 formerly incarcerated men living in New York City, as well as with their family members, exploring the multiple financial costs people face to meet their basic needs during incarceration. Our findings show that people must spend considerable sums in order to cover basic needs while incarcerated, and that they often have to rely heavily on family and friends for financial assistance. As a consequence, incarcerated individuals and their families often face an impossible choice: drain the household’s resources to support their loved ones inside or leave them exposed to the most brutal forms of deprivation.

The amount Pennsylvania spent on food per incarcerated person in 1996 was $8.96 per day.

By 2018, Pennsylvania reduced the amount to $2.61 per day.

Daily Amount That States Spent On Prison Food Per Person, 1996 – 2018

Source: Impact Justice, 2021

Hourly wages for incarcerated people by state.

Based on our own research, we estimated that an individual spends about $1250 on commissary per year. Because they can’t possibly make that much money on prison wages, much of that cost is borne by families on the outside, who are already economically vulnerable.

—Thuy Linh Tu, Faculty Researcher, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis, NYU

The cost of covid.

With no effective safety protocols in place, it fell on the incarcerated to avoid illness. Prison porters—paid $0.17 per hour, and often without protection equipment—for instance, worked hard to contain the spread of infection by carefully sanitizing common spaces.

Interviewers Tommaso Bardelli and Zach Gillespie

Incarcerated people and their families have been especially vulnerable to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Prisons and jails have become epicenters of the pandemic as have the poor, urban, predominantly Black and brown neighborhoods from which they draw. The pandemic has had important and long-term ramifications for life inside prison facilities, including for the financial costs faced by incarcerated people and their families. By drawing on in-depth interviews and oral histories with people who were incarcerated during the pandemic, as well as with their families, this project examines different aspects of the COVID-19 crisis in New York State prisons, from the lack of adequate medical care experienced by incarcerated persons, to the challenges of staying in touch with loved ones and the heightened costs of prison telecommunications.

I don’t see how a closed population could catch COVID if no one from the outside didn’t bring it in, and that’s not being addressed. … Because I know for a fact that sometimes they knew that officers were sick.

C., interviewed on May 20, 2021, was released on March 29, 2021

How the Pandemic Affected Incarcerated People and Their Loved Ones

By aiyuba thomas and tommaso bardelli, prism reports , may 16, 2022.

“Not a Place to Get Sick”: Punishment and Illness in New York Prisons During the COVID-19 Pandemic

By tommaso bardelli and aiyuba thomas, disability covid chronicles , may 20, 2021, • brooklyn defender services.

Brooklyn Defender Services is a public defense office that provides outstanding representation and advocacy to people facing loss of freedom, family separation and other serious legal harms.

Brooklyn Defender Services

• Million Dollar Hoods at UCLA

Million Dollar Hood at UCLA  maps and documents the human and fiscal costs of mass incarceration in Los Angeles and beyond.  Launched in September 2016, the Million Dollar Hoods website, began by hosting digital maps that show how much is spent per neighborhood on incarceration in Los Angeles County. 

Million Dollar Hood at UCLA 

• Center for Urban Pedagogy

Center For Urban Pedagogy

Creative tools for building community power

We collaborate with community organizations, schools, visual designers, and artists to make information about public policies, processes, and systems, accessible.

https://welcometocup.org/

• Abolish Slavery National Network, ASSN

Abolish Slavery National Network, ASSN   is a national coalition fighting to abolish constitutional slavery and involuntary servitude in all forms, for all people.

We envision a United States where all people, without exception, are free from slavery and involuntary servitude and where all people are protected by their state and federal constitution.

We are organizing in more than 20 states to abolish slavery from state constitutions.

Five states saw ballot initiatives in 2022.

Eleven states introduced legislation in 2023, and more states expect ballot initiatives before 2024 elections.

https://abolishslavery.us  Abolish Slavery National Network

• Worth Rises

Worth Rises is a non-profit advocacy organization dedicated to dismantling the prison industry and ending the exploitation of those it touches. We work to expose the commercialization of the criminal legal system and advocate and organize to protect and return the economic resources extracted from affected communities. Through our work, we strive to pave a road toward a safe and just world free of police and prisons.

https://worthrises.org

• 13th Forward

13th Forward  is a legislative coalition of advocates, grassroots organizations, and impacted people working to end exploitation and brutality within our prison labor system.

Formerly LaborIsLabor, 13th Forward was formed in 2019 by Worth Rises and the Legal Aid Society. Our steering committee is currently led by Citizen Action of New York, Color Of Change, The Legal Aid Society, and the New York Civil Liberties Union and A Little Piece of Light. We are part of the 2023   Justice Roadmap for New York .

https://13thforward.com/

• Legal Action Center

The Legal Action Center (LAC) uses legal and policy strategies to fight discrimination, build health equity, and restore opportunity for people with arrest and conviction records, substance use disorders, and HIV or AIDS.

Legal Action Center

• New Media Advocacy Project (N-Map)

  The New Media Advocacy Project (N-Map) advances human rights by merging law with multimedia storytelling to bring the voices of people who have suffered human rights abuse into the halls of power. In partnership with human rights defenders around the world, we produce tactical, audience-focused videos that help win cases and campaigns, influence policy, mobilize communities, and make the policy and law more accessible. We explore how new modes of storytelling, emerging technologies, and law can combine to ensure the human rights movement evolves and remains effective.

The New Media Advocacy Project (N-Map)

• The Marshall Project

The Marshall Project is a nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization that seeks to create and sustain a sense of national urgency about the U.S. criminal justice system. We have an impact on the system through journalism, rendering it more fair, effective, transparent and humane.

The Marshall Project

• Visiting Room Project

The Visiting Room Project  is a digital experience that invites the public to sit face-to-face with people serving life without the possibility of parole to hear them tell their stories, in their own words. More than five years in the making, the site is the only collection of its kind, containing over 100 filmed interviews with people currently serving life without parole. The interviews were filmed at Angola, the Louisiana State Penitentiary, which is, in many ways, the epicenter of life without parole sentences worldwide. As of 2022, more than 55,000 Americans are living in prisons serving life without parole, their lives largely hidden from public view. 

Visiting Room Project

Timeline of Lab Publications

Surviving Austerity: commissary stores, inequality and punishment in the contemporary American prison

By tommaso bardelli, zach gillespie and thuy linh tu, lpe project , august 8 , 2023.

New York State Should Stop Seizing Child Support Payments

A guest essay on newsday by lynne haney and aunray stanford,, june 30, 2023.

How US Police Got the Deadly Power to Stop Drivers at Will

A guest essay on the guardian by julie livingston and andrew ross., february 3, 2023.

The High Cost of Cheap Prisons

By tommaso bardelli, zach gillespie, and thuy linh tu, starting in the early 2000s, a bipartisan consensus emerged around the untenable price tag of mass imprisonment., the law and political economy project , april 12, 2023.

Alabama Rising

By andrew ross and aiyuba thomas, for the past decade, people incarcerated in alabama have led successful national worker strikes. could a new prisoners’ rights movement be underway, inquest, may 25, 2023, cycles of debt and punishment: a symposium on prisons of debt: the afterlives of incarcerated fathers, by jason m. williams, lynne haney, maretta mcdonald, and michael b. mitchell, through comments on lynne haney ’ s book, prisons of debt: the afterlives of incarcerated fathers , the authors analyze the criminalization of child support and the ways it complicates reentry after prison., the prison journal 1 – 19 © 2023 sage publications.

Once You See the Truth About Cars, You Can’t Unsee it

A new york times opinion essay by julie livingston and andrew ross, december 15, 2022.

Making Men Pay

By lynne haney, inquest , june 21, 2022.

BOOK PROJECT

By julie livingston and andrew ross, drawing on interviews with formerly incarcerated men and women, cars and jails examines how the costs of car ownership and use are deeply enmeshed with the american prison system., published 2022.

Rethinking the “Human Warehouse”: Economic Life in the Austere Prison

Marxist sociology blog , november 16, 2022, prisons of debt: the afterlives of incarcerated fathers, a profound portrait of the hidden injustices that trap fathers in a cycle of punishment and debt., by lynne haney.

Against the day: dispatches on carceral debt

A special dossier with essays by pep lab researchers, south atlantic quarterly , volume 121, issue 4, october 1, 2022.

How Corporations Turned Prison Tablets Into a Predatory Scheme

By tommaso bardelli,   ruqaiyah zarook   and   derick mccarthy, dissent , march 7, 2022.

Probation Profiteering Is the New Debtors’ Prison

By andrew ross, we must end the widespread practice of funding government budgets by extorting poor people apprehended for minor offenses., boston review , november 9, 2021.

Blood From a Stone: How New York Prisons Force People to Pay for their Own Incarceration

Prison policy initiative, october 27, 2021, the debt and incarceration collection at tamiment library & robert f. wagner labor archive.

The collection includes anonymized transcripts of interviews conducted with formerly incarcerated New Yorkers and their families by PEP Research Lab’s researchers (2019-2023). The interviews document the multiple financial costs people face to cover basic needs during incarceration, and how decades of fiscal austerity and the privatization of basic services within the prison system progressively shifted the economic costs of incarceration onto prisoners and their families.

Faculty researchers.

Lynne Haney

Faculty Researcher

Professor of Sociology, Director of Law and Society Undergraduate Program, NYU

David Knight

Assistant Professor of Sociology, Columbia University

Thuy Linh Tu

Peer researchers.

Zachary Gillespie

Peer Researcher

Major: Social and Cultural Analysis and American Studies

Tommaso Bardelli

Affiliate Researcher

Visiting Scholar and Director of Research at Worth Rises

Debanjan Roychoudhury

Affiliate Postdoc

Postdoctoral Fellow, NYU Prison Education Program

Julie Livingston

Affiliate Faculty

Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History, NYU

Research Assistants, Alumni, and Interns

Research assistants.

Gabriela Azevedo, Jacob Hood, Paolina Lu, Kassandra Manriquez

Undergraduate

Peer researchers.

Aiyuba Thomas, Joshua Barreto, José Diaz, Hashani Forester, Derick McCarthy, Jesus Mejia, Vincent Thompson.

Prison Education Program at Stuyvesant High School

Brandon George, Stella Ross Gray, Zola Ross Gray, Nina Harris, Hazel Livingston, Huyen Nguyen

Research Finds Prison Education Programs Reduce Recidivism

Programs help ex-offenders and save taxpayers money.

MIDLAND, Mich. — The highest quality research on prison education and workforce programs shows a positive impact on recidivism rates, earnings and employment opportunities for participants. The Mackinac Center for Public Policy released a summary of this research — the largest meta-analysis on the topic to date. The complete analysis will be published in an academic journal later this year.

Steven Sprick Schuster and Ben Stickle authored the report, working with the Political Economy Research Institute at Middle Tennessee State University. They are both professors at the university — Sprick Schuster in economics and Stickle in criminal justice administration.

They found in their review of published research that prison workforce and education programs reduce the likelihood of recidivism by 14.8%. The findings also show positive employment benefits for former offenders, including a 6.9% increase in the likelihood of employment and an extra $131 in quarterly wages.

“This research makes clear that investment in prison-based education and workforce training programs produces both safer communities and positive economic returns,” said David Guenthner, vice president for government affairs at the Mackinac Center. “We all benefit from having more ex-offenders equipped to earn their success in the workforce.”

The United States has the sixth highest prison population, with five in 1,000 people behind bars. The cost of incarcerating so many people is steep. Taxpayers spend an estimated $182 billion a year to house prisoners, pay police, and provide for courts, health care, and additional expenses. Given that many prisoners are reoffenders, some states have turned to education and workforce training in an effort to reduce recidivism and prison costs.

This meta-analysis compiled 148 results from 78 of the highest-quality research papers and studies. It used those estimates to evaluate the average effects prison educational programs have on prisoner recidivism, employment and wages. The findings are divided out by educational level, including adult basic education, high school and GED programs, vocational training and college.

Sprick Schuster and Stickle also calculated the return on investment of these programs. They found that college education programs produce the best benefit for participants, while work training provides the best return on investment from a taxpayer’s perspective. The ROI for each program was positive and that does not include many indirect benefits of lowering recidivism rates, such as fewer victims of criminal behavior and other indirect costs of crime.

Giving former offenders a better chance of success upon reentry into society should be a priority. Unfortunately, very few inmates have the opportunity to take advantage of these programs.

“Even in more forward-thinking states like Michigan, only a minuscule percentage of the inmates released back into society have access to these programs,” said Guenthner. “We will work with our research team and policymakers to lay out a path to substantially expanding these programs.”

Read the summary of the meta-analysis’ findings here .

The Mackinac Center for Public Policy is a nonprofit research and educational institute that advances the principles of free markets and limited government. Through our research and education programs, we challenge government overreach and advocate for a free-market approach to public policy that frees people to realize their potential and dreams.

Please consider contributing to our work to advance a freer and more prosperous state.

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Home > JPER

The Journal of Prison Education and Reentry has changed its name to The Journal of Prison Education Research . Please go to our new site https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/joper/ for current issues of the journal and current information about submitting articles.

The archives of The Journal of Prison Education and Reentry , from Vol. 1 (2014) to Vol. 7 No. 3 (2021-2023) will continue to be available at this site https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/jper/

Current Issue: Volume 7, Number 3 ( 2021-2023 )

Research papers.

The Impact of Parenting Classes on Incarcerated Mothers Kimberly D. Phillips Dr. and Kyong-Ah Kwon

Being an Educator: Norwegian Prison Officers’ Conception of their Role regarding Incarcerated Persons’ Education Helene Marie K. Eide and Kariane Therese Westrheim

The Right to Education: A Reality or Pipe Dream for Incarcerated Young Prisoners in Malawi Samson Chaima Kajawo and Lineo R. Johnson

Teaching in an unfamiliar place: A mixed methods-grounded theory study on the experiences of new correctional educators Nicole Patrie

Practitioner Papers

Book Review of Learning Behind Bars: How IRA Prisoners Shaped the Peace Process in Ireland Daniel Weinbren

Book Review of Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration Neal McNabb

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Libraries | Research Guides

Prison education.

• Introduction
• Teaching & Research

NPEP Library

Prison library resources, acknowledgements, your librarian.

The NPEP Library at Northwestern University Libraries supports the educational mission and activities of the Northwestern Prison Education Project (NPEP) by enabling access to research materials and consultations with librarians, strengthening our collections in social justice, creating and providing informational literacy resources, extending our suite of services to incarcerated students, and applying the ethics of librarianship to advocate for alternatives to policing, surveillance, and incarceration.

Research Support We provide research and reference support for incarcerated students via correspondence and in-person consultations, enabling access to library resources such as scholarly books and articles, encyclopedia entries, poetry and artwork, case law, news stories, websites, and much more. This work is mostly facilitated through student access to our Research Request Form which you can download, view, and feel free to adapt .

Information Literacy We provide in-person and correspondence-based instruction to incarcerated students on issues of information literacy—from understanding the internet to academic research—and work with instructors and tutors to create accessible guides and printable resources for NPEP courses.

Open Education Resources We provide support and funding for the development of open educational resources (OER) from researching and recommending OER across all disciplines to collaborating on the production of original OER through the Affordable Instructional Resources initiative.

Collection Development We provide the selection of and access to publications and special collections dedicated to social justice relevant across all disciplines, the voices of the currently and formerly incarcerated, research on policing and prisons,  and new and future works on restorative, transformative, and community-based approaches to safety and justice.

• Abolitionist Library Association A collective of library workers, students, and community members taking action to divest from all forms of policing in libraries and invest in our collective liberation. We envision a world without policing or prisons. Our goal is to create libraries that are rooted in community self-determination and intellectual freedom through collective action.
• ALA Standards for Library Services for Incarcerated and Detained Individuals Guidelines, case studies, and more, from the American Library Association
• Expanding Information Access for Incarcerated People Initiative Expanding Information Access for Incarcerated People is based in SFPL’s Jail and Reentry Services program. In coordination with the American Library Association (ALA), this project will identify existing library services for incarcerated people, support professionals in the field in building out or creating new services, solidify library services to incarcerated people as a focused area of concern within librarianship, develop digital literacy programming for people who are formerly incarcerated, and provide guidance for librarians working in juvenile detention centers, jails, and prisons nationwide.
• IFLA Guidelines for Library Services to Prisoners (4th Edition) Provides a tool for the planning, implementation, and evaluation of library services to prisoners in all kinds of places of incarceration, including adult and juvenile prisons, detention centers, and jails.
• List of Law Libraries Serving Prisoners Law Libraries Serving Prisoners is intended as a referral source for librarians and prisoners seeking access to legal materials.
• Prison Librarianship & Abolition Zotero Library A public Zotero group library full of readings and resources about prison librarianship and the roles of libraries in the abolition movement.
• Prison Library Support Network An information-based collective founded in 2016 to support incarcerated people by organizing networks for sharing resources and building community around prison abolition in libraries, archives, and other knowledge-based institutions.

The UPEP Library supports the students of the Undergraduate Prison Education Program (UPEP) , an initiative that cultivates collaboration between Evanston undergraduates and students in the Northwestern Prison Education Program (NPEP) through prison education initiatives. These initiatives include events, tutoring, workshops, classes, awareness and advocacy campaigns in Evanston, supplies drives, and fundraising events supporting prison education. UPEP’s mission is to bring awareness about mass incarceration and education in the correctional system to the broader Northwestern community, and members also run a Peer Mentorship Program at Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice facilities.

UPEP students supporting incarcerated students and learners can reach out to Josh Honn at [email protected] to set up a research consultation, request a book or ebook purchase for the collection, information literacy support, and to connect with other library resources. A few helpful resources for UPEP volunteers include:

• Start Your Research A comprehensive step-by-step guide to the scholarly research process, including everything from finding to citing sources and more.  
• Subject Librarians Find a librarian who specializes in the area of research you are working in.

Thank you to the many library workers across the profession who have been doing and continue to grow this work. We would especially like to thank Dr. Jeanie Austin , whose work and writing in this area has been foundational and inspirational; our colleagues at Jackson College Library , whose support for the Jackson College Corrections Education Program deeply informed many of our services; and the NPEP Graduate Student Advisory Committee for all of their support in helping to get this project off the ground.

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• Last Updated: Jul 17, 2024 3:30 PM
• URL: https://libguides.northwestern.edu/prison-education

Open Campus

Covering colleges for communities

Is prison education worth it?

A biweekly newsletter about the future of postsecondary education in prisons. Written by Open Campus national reporter Charlotte West.

College Inside

Sign up for the newsletter.

A biweekly newsletter about the future of postsecondary education in prisons. By Charlotte West.

Short on time? Here are the highlights:

• This week, we have  a first-person essay from incarcerated writer Jesse Carson , who writes that prison education programs risk being absorbed into the prison bureaucracy. This  story was published in partnership  with the Prison Journalism Project. 
• ICYMI:  California has more incarcerated college students than any other state in the country, but more than 60% of the classes taken by the state’s incarcerated community college students are  correspondence courses , which have lower completion rates than face-to-face classes.

‘My college experience behind bars made me feel less than human.’

This story was written by  Jesse Carson, the editor-in-chief for the Mule Creek Post, published out of the Mule Creek State Prison in California. He’s a recent graduate in communication studies from Sacramento State University.

I have been taking college classes since 2005. During that time, I’ve completed three associate degrees, earned membership in the international Phi Theta Kappa honor society, and recently graduated from California State University, Sacramento, with a bachelor’s degree in communication studies. But even though I have used my time in prison to educate myself, I’m not sure I’d recommend it to anyone else. 

It is nearly impossible to find a prison education program that treats us like students who happen to be incarcerated, rather than prisoners who happen to be taking college classes. 

Some people think that getting into a college program in prison is the biggest hurdle. But it’s actually harder to remain motivated to stay in college. There are many significant barriers to college for the incarcerated, including filling out paper financial aid forms when everything is processed electronically, finding proctors for exams and doing research for classes when we don’t have internet access. We don’t have access to any of the campus resources that our peers on the outside do. These are all examples of a larger trend that speaks to the prison system’s treatment of us as inventory, not people. 

Once we find our way in, we learn that the prison system has also absorbed college education into its bureaucracy, finding yet another way to dehumanize us. 

Piecing together a puzzle

In my California prison, my community college classes are covered by state grants and my bachelor’s degree is now covered by federal Pell Grants. That’s not the case everywhere. 

When I first started my educational journey, nearly 20 years ago, I still had to pay for all my own books. And after I earned an associate degree, in 2008, I was unable to find a bachelor’s program for less than $1,400 per class. 

Almost all California prisons partner with a local community college to provide a path to an associate degree. This is how most incarcerated students in California start higher education. 

Many times these  classes are offered by correspondence only , but some colleges provide face-to-face instruction. Waiting lists to get into classes can be very long, as priority is given to continuing students, and not every class needed to earn a degree is provided in person.

In fact, some colleges only provide the classes required for graduation every couple of years. One school, for example, requires a mass communication course to earn an associate degree, but it is only made available every other year or so, and only for a small class size at each institution. Students may wait years to take their last class to earn a degree.

Other community colleges provide no academic advising, leaving students to guess their way to a degree. I know guys who have been students for years, blindly taking classes hoping to earn an associate degree. They get frustrated that it’s taking so long and feel like they aren’t making any progress. They know what the graduation requirements are, but they have no way of knowing, for example, which classes from other colleges have been transferred, or which classes count as electives and which are major requirements.

It’s almost impossible to earn the degree without piecing together classes from multiple community colleges, but that’s like trying to complete a puzzle with no idea what the picture is on the box. 

This creates a problem for those wanting to transfer their credits toward a bachelor’s degree. The process can sometimes take several years because the associate-level classes they need to meet the degree requirements aren’t always offered regularly. Sometimes students learn that a class they completed to meet a requirement isn’t accepted by a university degree program.

The previously-mentioned community college mass communication class, for example, doesn’t meet Sac State’s mass communication bachelor’s degree requirement, so a student has to enroll in a different community college just to take one single lower-division class. There actually aren’t any community colleges that offer all the lower-division classes required by Sac State.

Finding the elusive bachelor’s degree

Until recent years when universities brought their programs into prisons, students with associate degrees had no chance to earn an advanced degree. And so we largely stopped our education. But even now, once a person has earned their associate degree, it’s another waiting game. Hundreds of students with associate degrees vie for about 50 seats in the three-year bachelor’s program at my prison.

In 2021, I saw a flyer soliciting students for Sac State’s new bachelor’s program at Mule Creek State Prison, where I’m incarcerated. With the  return of Pell Grant eligibility  for incarcerated students in 2023, there are now nine bachelor’s programs at California prisons, with more coming soon.   

This was welcome news. I had just earned my second associate degree after more than a decade of failing to find an affordable bachelor’s program. I expressed interest in joining the new program to our prison’s education department, but nothing ever came of that — or so I thought. 

One day at work, I learned I had actually been enrolled in classes after all. An officer came up to me and said I had to move to another building “for college.” 

This was a welcome if unexpected development. But that was followed by disappointment. Unlike students on regular college campuses, we didn’t get to select our major. The college offered only a bachelor’s in communication studies. There were no other options. 

None of us would’ve chosen communication studies as a major if given the choice — we all had a different particular subject that really spoke to us. But on the first day of class for Sac State, we were told what courses we would be taking. We were expected to be grateful for the opportunity. 

Not treated like students

In these education programs, we are still considered prisoners, constantly told what we’re going to do and when. We are not treated like students who collaborate in their own education. 

This became even more evident last summer, when I was assigned to the prison’s new life skills class — a mandatory program for those nearing release or facing a parole hearing. The class overlapped exactly with one of the two electives I needed to finish my bachelor’s degree. 

The supervising counselor agreed to let me split my time if I could work it out with my professor, so on the first day of my college classes, I missed an hour of the life skills class to ask the faculty member for flexibility. However, when I showed up for the life skills class, I was met by the guard in charge of attendance, who told me that missing any of the life skills class would result in disciplinary action and removal from the college program. 

Fortunately, I was able to take the college class completely by correspondence; my bunkmate was also in the class and brought me the assignments, which I then  turned in on Canvas , an electronic learning management system where students submit assignments. 

But the fact that we found a workaround is beside the point. 

I didn’t even know I had graduated last fall, because I had been told I still needed one more elective. I had been confused and frustrated.

Then some transcripts came in the mail in March, with the line: “Degree conferral date: 1/2/2024.” No congratulations, no letter from the school, no meeting with the program director. Nothing. Just done.

I finally got my actual diploma a few months ago. I’ll admit: there’s something about holding that paper in my hands. Normally I’m not the type who gets much pride out of my accomplishments, just the satisfaction of a completed project. I’m actually proud of this when I see it, and I’ve been sharing it with others. 

But I am also relieved that it’s over. 

Obviously, college programs in prison must adapt to the environment, and sometimes that means doing things the way that prisons want them done. Professors are  visitors in a foreign land  and can be kicked out if they don’t follow certain rules and regulations.

But there’s a difference between following rules and becoming a part of the system itself, treating students like they are just warehoused inventory waiting to be told what to do. As more colleges expand into prisons, I can only hope that they start to treat us the way they describe us: We are their students too.

Related coverage: 

• Incarcerated Californians are doing college by mail. It makes it harder to get to the finish line.
• ‘I had never owned a computer. After 17 years in prison, I finally have one of my own.’
• ‘You need to stop having your pity parties and do the work.’

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 .

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Charlotte West

Open Campus national reporter covering the future of postsecondary education in prison. More by Charlotte West