Higher Ed’s Message to Ex-Felons: No Second Chances

In an open letter, “We are Educators, Not Prosecutors,” 166 professors at Harvard University last month denounced administrators for unilaterally overturning a decision by the history department to admit Michelle Jones, a highly talented applicant for graduate school, because of a felony conviction 21 years earlier. She was released in August.

What neither the Harvard faculty statement nor related news accounts noted is that discrimination against incarcerated and post-incarcerated applicants to graduate school is commonplace. As directors of college programs in prisons, we have been joined by a number of our colleagues at other institutions in supporting the position expressed in the Harvard faculty letter. We know this discrimination all too well.

Let’s just consider, for example, Anastazia Schmid, a talented historian and playwright. She was a founding member of the Prison History Project at the Indiana Women’s Prison, where she was incarcerated, which has challenged nearly every orthodoxy about the history of women’s prisons in the country. Schmid’s research is also helping to rewrite the history of gynecology and eugenics in the 19th century. The quality of her work garnered her the American Studies Association’s 2016 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Award for outstanding independent scholarship. But when she applied to the masters program at Reed College in Oregon for admission the following year, she was told she could not apply while still incarcerated.

Yet at least Schmid’s application was considered. The hurdles that incarcerated students face in applying for graduate school are so great that very few applications ever reach academic departments for consideration.

First, most graduate schools require that applications be submitted online. Since their own online application portals prohibit anyone other than the applicant from filling out those forms, this requirement effectively bars our students from applying, as they have no access to the internet.

Second, many graduate schools, including those at top private universities like Yale, make clear their hostility toward applicants who have been convicted of a felony by requiring such information upfront, instantly (and, for some, probably intentionally) deterring most incarcerated and post-incarcerated would-be applicants from applying.

Third, although the GRE can be offered offline in prisons, jumping through the dozens of hoops to offer it is expensive, time-consuming, and impractical, especially since few prisons are likely to have more than one or two students applying to graduate school at any one time.

Fourth, applying to graduate school from prison virtually requires the support of a dedicated person on the outside who is familiar with the application process, an expertise that is hard to come by. Furthermore, while such support may exist in the few prisons where there are active college programs, for anyone in a prison where no such program exists, getting over these hurdles is a near impossibility.

Which brings us to the most important reason that there are so few graduate applications from highly talented incarcerated students: Postsecondary education programs in most prisons have been seriously scaled back and devalued over the past 25 years. Most of the nearly 2,000 prisons in the United States either lack resources to support higher-education study or are unwilling to provide such support, and the majority of colleges do not have formal programs for incarcerated people. Fewer than 34 college-affiliated programs in the United States confer a bachelor’s degree for incarcerated students.

This dearth of programs isn’t just a question of fairness to those who have been convicted of crimes. It is colleges themselves — and the quality of knowledge that society relies on them to disseminate — that are impoverished by excluding incarcerated and post-incarcerated students from graduate work.

“There is insight … to be gained from looking at the world from our perspective; the perspective of the marginalized who are captive in a secretive and closed world,” Michelle Jones wrote in a compelling article in the Journal of Prisoners on Prisons last year. Scholars whose ideas have been forged inside prisons “are available to interpret the lived experience of incarceration and synthesize its individual impact and societal consequences. … Our expertise can contribute to the academy in history, cultural anthropology, psychology, art, literature, and so much more. … To exclude our rich perspectives severely limits knowledge and critique.”

The letter by Harvard professors called on the university to end discrimination against incarcerated and post-incarcerated students and to support higher-education programs in prison. In particular, they called upon universities to add “criminal history” as another protected status on nondiscrimination statements. We heartily endorse these policy positions and add an urgent request that colleges and universities allow offline applications for incarcerated applicants — as they should do for anyone without access to the internet.

Erin L. Castro is director and co-founder of the Prison Education Project and an assistant professor in the department of educational leadership and policy at the University of Utah. Rebecca Ginsburg is director of the Education Justice Project and an associate professor in the department of educational policy, organization, and leadership at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Marc M. Howard is director of the Prisons and Justice Initiative and a professor of government and law at Georgetown University.