Ending Ban on Pell Grants for Prisoners Is Said to Yield ‘Cascade’ of Benefits

U.S. Education Department

For 25 years, almost no pathway has existed for incarcerated Americans to receive Pell Grants, the most widely used form of financial aid for low-income students. Reopening that pathway, a new report says, would allow hundreds of thousands of people to take college courses, creating “a cascade of economic benefits.”

The report, published on Wednesday by the Georgetown Law School’s Center on Poverty and Inequality and the Vera Institute of Justice, describes a domino effect: With access to Pell Grants, it says, more incarcerated people could afford to take college classes while in prison. When they are released, they’d be less likely to reoffend and more likely to look for work. Businesses would have a larger pool of potential job applicants, the report says, and more former prisoners would get better-paying jobs.

Prisoners have been excluded from the federal Pell Grant program since 1994, when President Bill Clinton signed a sweeping crime bill that, among other things, enacted the ban. Before then, college courses in prison were relatively common. With Clinton’s signature, funding for those programs dried up. Meanwhile, the prison population ballooned.

Advocates for the programs have tried since then to reopen the door. In 2015 the U.S. Department of Education announced the Second Chance Pell Experimental Sites Initiative. Through that effort, 65 colleges — most of them community colleges — provide training and education at nearby prisons, where prisoners can apply for Pell Grants. Those colleges serve about 12,000 prisoners annually, a sliver of the more than 1.5 million people who are currently incarcerated.

Both Republicans and Democrats have floated plans for lifting the ban. Last year Sen. Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican who leads the education committee, said the panel would consider eliminating the ban through the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, but that is not expected to happen anytime soon. The Democratic Party’s version of the bill, called the Aim Higher Act, would end the ban.

The new report examines what would happen if those efforts came to pass. Here are a few key findings:

Of the more than 1.5 million people who are locked up in federal and state prisons, the vast majority will eventually be released. About 64 percent of them, or 960,000 people, already had a high-school diploma or a GED before they went to prison. But only 9 percent of prisoners complete some form of postsecondary education behind bars, the report says. Most receive a certificate from a college or a trade school. Just 2 percent of prisoners get an associate degree.

However, those low numbers don’t mean lower interest. A 2014 survey found that 70 percent of incarcerated people wanted to enroll in an academic program. Of them, a little under half wanted to enroll in a postsecondary program. The problem isn’t desire. It’s access, said Margaret diZerega, a project director at the Vera Institute and a co-author of the report. Even if prisoners are academically eligible, she said, most cannot afford to enroll.

In state prisons, which hold the vast majority of America’s prisoners, about 463,000 people are eligible for Pell Grants, the report estimates. (It defines “Pell Grant eligible” as an incarcerated person who is age 18 to 54, who does not have a life sentence, and whose highest level of education was a high-school diploma or a GED. Given that prisoners are not able to earn even minimum wage, the report’s authors worked under the assumption that they all meet the income requirements for a Pell Grant.) The report does not estimate the number of federal prisoners who are Pell Grant eligible.

If 50 percent of state prisoners who are Pell eligible were able to participate in a postsecondary program, the overall employment rate for formerly incarcerated workers would bump up by 2.1 percent during their first year after release, the report says. Right now, only half of formerly incarcerated people find formal work within their first year out of prison, according to data from the Internal Revenue Service.

Eliminating the ban would also drive down spending on state prisons. Across all states, incarceration costs would drop by a combined $366 million per year, the report estimates. That’s because higher education reduces recidivism rates. “It’s a cost saver that’s a better investment than the status quo,” diZerega said. Nearly half of people who are released from prison are back behind bars within three years. But those odds fall by nearly 50 percent for people who take college courses, the report says. There’s some self-selection bias in that finding, the report says, but not enough to discount the decrease.

Access to Pell Grants won’t eliminate the employment and wage gaps between formerly incarcerated people and people who have not gone to prison, the report notes. But it could improve their job prospects and earnings “in a very meaningful way.”

There’s a reason to talk about this issue now, said Arthur Rizer, a policy director at the R Street Institute, a center-right think tank that supports lifting the ban: “The iron is hot.” Eliminating the ban is one of the few things that conservatives and progressives have expressed some agreement on.

And it would give people in prison “an ounce of hope,” Rizer said. “In the classroom, they’re seen as worthy investments,” he said, “as opposed to another number to be watched” by corrections officials.

Emma Pettit is a staff reporter at The Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter @EmmaJanePettit, or email her at emma.pettit@chronicle.com.