The Obama administration is poised to announce on Friday that it will offer Pell Grants to some prisoners, the first adult inmates to be eligible for the grants since Congress barred prisoners from receiving them more than 20 years ago.
The scope of the offer will be very limited: Only a small, as-yet-unspecified number of inmates will be able to participate. They’ll do so through a pilot program that creates an “experimental site” — a lab, of sorts, that allows the Education Department to study the plan’s effectiveness without approval from Congress. The law blocking prisoners from receiving Pell money will remain on the books.
Still, for advocates and colleges working to bring higher education to prisoners, the announcement is significant. The past two decades have been a trying time for supporters of prison education programs. In 1995, shortly after Congress barred state and federal inmates from receiving Pell Grants, 350 prisons nationwide offered degree-granting programs. Most of those programs ended when colleges backed out.
The loss of federal funding triggered “a near crash of higher-education programs in prisons,” said John J. Dowdell, an editor of the Journal of Correctional Education and director of the Gill Center for Business and Economic Education at Ashland University, in Ohio.
Then funding for an Education Department program that subsidized education for young offenders ran out a few years ago, Mr. Dowdell added. “That was really the last bastion of federal funding in direct support of correctional education.”
A few states, like Ohio, have been able to sustain limited public funding to continue prison-education programs over the years. But most new and surviving programs rely almost solely on private money. It’s hard to count how many programs nationwide work with prisoners, said Rebecca Ginsburg, director of the Education Justice Project of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She said there were probably 40 to 50 programs like hers, which offers for-credit courses to male prisoners at the Danville Correctional Center.
The programs are few and far between, and often beset by long waiting lists, yet research strongly suggests that greater access to education in prisons helps reduce recidivism. A 2014 study by the RAND Corporation found a 43-percent reduction in recidivism among prisoners who had access to some sort of education while behind bars. (There’s uncertainty, however, about which types of higher education are most effective for prisoners.)
Shifting State Politics
A growing sentiment that “a high-school degree is basically worthless” has helped bring the topic back into discussion on a federal level, said Stephen Steurer, executive director of the Correctional Education Association. But a growing bipartisan push behind criminal-justice reform has had a large impact, too.
The Pell Grant announcement, which will be made at a prison in Jessup, Md., by officials from the Departments of Education and Justice, comes a few weeks after President Obama announced broader plans of his own for criminal-justice reform, through which he hopes to take on issues like overcrowding in prisons.
The issue is far from a clear winner. Last year, when Andrew M. Cuomo, New York’s Democratic governor, proposed spending about $1 million to improve higher-education access in the state’s prisons, lawmakers in both parties pushed back. He then said he would seek private funding for such a program.
If education access for prisoners gains traction at the federal level, that could make it easier for state governments to follow suit with support of their own, said Sean Pica, executive director of the Hudson Link for Higher Education in Prison, which brokers deals between college programs, incarcerated students, and prisons.
Where New York failed, however, California found some success. Nearly a year ago the state passed a law that created a $2-million pilot program connecting four of the state’s community colleges with prisons to offer certificates, associate degrees, and transferable credits.
The colleges will offer traditional services to students, like counseling and academic planning, which are “as important as the actual instruction,” said B.J. Snowden, director of inmate education at the California Community Colleges chancellor’s office. “The idea of counseling and academic planning is going to be essential to the students who are currently incarcerated really being able to see an end to the path.”
The California initiative is covered by the community colleges’ fee-waiver program, but Mr. Snowden said he was in favor of programs that would allow inmates from across the country to have greater access to education.
“I hope we can be the trendsetters,” he said. “I hope that the innovative approaches that we are making towards making education accessible and high quality will be models throughout the country.”
Success Stories
Some experts said it was too early to weigh in on the Obama administration’s experimental plan, but they contemplated the effects of broader federal support for prison education. Prisoners’ eligibility for Pell Grants would alleviate stress on the programs within colleges and working with colleges to offer higher education to inmates, said Ms. Ginsburg, an architecture professor who co-founded the Education Justice Project at Illinois. The initiative could make partnerships with prisons more attractive to colleges that abandoned programs years ago, as well as to other institutions, she said.
“I really hope that as the Pell Grants-funded program starts to operate, it will produce success stories, which I think it will,” she said. “I hope it will be an incentive for further reform, inside prisons in the U.S. and on the outside.”
Funding from Pell Grants would also make it easier for the program to continue supporting students after they’re released from prison, she said. Students don’t always complete their certificate or degree program before they are released, so it’s important that they are supported once they’re back outside.
Pell funding would also let Ms. Ginsburg and others who run privately funded programs know that they would have money coming in from year to year. That would be “such a relief,” she said.
“It would mean some security,” she said. “We could put down stronger organizational, structural roots, be able to plan more into the future, have a stronger learning experience for our students.”
Mr. Pica, of the Hudson Link, said more confidence about funding sources would be a helpful outcome of broader Pell Grant eligibility. “Every single semester, I don’t know if there’s going to be another semester,” he said. “It really stinks to operate not knowing what next semester is going to look like.”
