Advocacy and Policy

A New Path: Deportation to Honduras is a new guide from the Education Justice Project that provides clear, practical information for individuals facing deportation to Honduras.

The guide covers:

• What to expect upon arrival in Honduras, including how to stay safe;
• Information on housing, employment, education, and more;
• Practical tips for navigating the return and reintegration process;
• A directory of organizations offering support.

Created collaboratively with non-profits and recently deported individuals, our goal is not to facilitate deportation. Rather, we aim to deliver critical information to those facing deportation.

Download the free pdfs (in English and Spanish) at https://reentryillinois.net/a-new-path-individual-chapters/#honduras-deportation-guide

This Honduras deportation guide is part of a larger resource called A New Path: A Guide to the Challenges and Opportunities After Deportation. We are in the process of updating this guide for 2026 and are sharing out individual chapters as they become available. To request copies of the most recent print edition, please fill out this request form.

This series of essays from the State University of New York (SUNY) showcases the stories of SUNY students and others connected to higher education in prison—stories that inspire, challenge, and enrich their communities. By sharing these lived experiences, SUNY aims to illuminate the broader significance of prison education programs and garner the support needed to expand SUNY's exceptional offerings, ensuring equitable access to higher education for all incarcerated individuals.

While correctional institutions provide orientation and training sessions to help instructors navigate the logistical and security aspects of teaching in such facilities, these efforts often have limitations. Notably, they tend to lack comprehensive guidance for instructors on effectively engaging students from a diverse range of cultural backgrounds and tailoring their pedagogical approaches to support students as they pursue their studies within the unique context of a correctional facility. 

In response to this identified gap, FICGN has collaborated with Jobs for the Future’s Center for Justice & Economic Advancement to support the development of high-quality postsecondary education programs in prisons that pave the way to economic advancement. Together, they have formulated this guidance to offer support to program staff members and instructors. The recommendations presented in this resource are designed to enhance the effectiveness of future orientation and training initiatives. Their aim is to ensure that these programs adequately address the needs of instructors and other key stakeholders who will directly interact with students who are incarcerated for the first time.  

The 2023 Colby College Justice Think Tank included 12 scholars from across all five Maine prisons, selected through a competitive application process and provided a stiped by the Alliance for Higher Education in Prison. During 2023, the Justice Think Tank Fellows conducted a research project of their own design, supported by Colby faculty and staff "walkalongs" who helped with document access, interview arrangements, and general support. The selected topic for 2023 was the restorative alternatives that Maine could develop to keep emerging adults out of the criminal legal system, that could reform the Maine Criminal Code to be more restorative and less punitive, and that could support a more restorative pathway to reentry from prison. 

The 2023 Colby College Justice Think Tank offered two public presentations to showcase their research and methodology. The first, "From the Inside Out: Systemic Political Transformation in Action," took place on Thursday, November 9, at the National Conference on Higher Education in Prison in Atlanta, Georgia. The second, sponsored by the Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs at Colby College, was held on November 28 and hosted by the Goldfarb Center Student Executive Board, with introductions by Catherine Besteman, Justice Think Tank Founder, and Ved Price, Executive Director of the Alliance for Higher Education in Prison.

This user-friendly Language Matters Guide builds on Jobs for the Future's 40 years of experience in the education and workforce ecosystem. The guide offers suggestions on how to write and speak about people in ways that promote equity, dignity, and a focus on each individual's potential—rather than labeling them based on the systemic barriers they face.

Topics covered include skills and socioeconomic status, race and ethnicity, criminal justice, and more. Because language is fluid, the recommendations will evolve. 

This press release details the U.S. Department of Education's announcement of a new path for borrowers who are incarcerated to exit default through consolidation, providing them access to improved credit and to better repayment options than ever before. Borrowers who had student loans before becoming incarcerated can now consolidate their loans to get out of default, providing them with certain types of loans—including Perkins Loans and commercially held Federal Family Education Loan Program (FFEL) loans—to gain access to income-driven repayment (IDR) plans like the Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) Plan. Borrowers who are incarcerated can still sign up for Fresh Start until September 30, 2024, as an additional option to exit default. Previously, this population of borrowers would have to rehabilitate their loans to get out of default, rather than having the option to consolidate.

This news article from the Washington Post explores how thousands of minors like Yusef Qualls-El, who is highlighted in the article, received sentences of life without parole and entered prison at an age when their peers were going to college or starting their careers. But inside, education is often reserved for those who will soon return to society. As a result, those who were seen as the least likely to get out had the fewest opportunities. The article showcases Yusef Qualls-El's story and his next steps.

This article reports that many people in Illinois prisons believe they are not getting the full sentence reductions allowed under a new law that gives credit for participating in education, work, and other programs. As many as 1,000 people who are still in custody could be eligible for immediate release if they received proper sentence recalculations. 

This report from the Prison Policy Initiative offers some much-needed clarity by piecing together the data about this country’s disparate systems of confinement. It provides a detailed look at where and why people are locked up in the U.S., and dispels some common myths about mass incarceration to focus attention on overlooked issues that urgently require reform.

This news article from Open Campus examines how disabled students in prison have not only been denied access to extra supports, like extended testing time or having text read aloud to them, but also didn’t even know they might qualify.

This resource from Jobs for the Future (JFF) can help students, advocates, and other stakeholders better understand the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).

FERPA is a federal law that protects the privacy of students’ education records. The term “education records” means those records that are (1) directly related to a student and (2) maintained by an educational agency or institution or by a party acting for the agency or institution. The law applies to all schools that receive funds under an applicable program of the U.S. Department of Education.

At the postsecondary level, FERPA affords “eligible students” the right to have access to their education records, the right to seek to have the records amended, and the right to have some control over the disclosure of information from the records.  

The Federal Interagency Reentry Council (FIRC) began work in 2011 to reduce recidivism and improve outcomes related to employment, education, housing, health, and child welfare. Comprising more than 20 federal agencies, the Reentry Council coordinated and leveraged existing federal resources, dispelled myths and clarified policies, elevated programs and policies that work, and reduced the policy barriers to successful reentry.

On April 29, 2016, President Barack Obama issued a Presidential Memorandum that formally established the Federal Interagency Reentry Council to help ensure the federal government continues this important work. 

This report responds to that directive by laying out specific agency actions—development of training, technical assistance, and strategic communications—to ensure federal staff, as well as state, local, and community stakeholders, are aware of the tools available to them, and are using them to implement robust reentry policies and programs.

The Federal Interagency Reentry Council worked to reduce recidivism and improve employment, education, housing, health and child welfare outcomes. Consisting of more than 20 federal agencies, the Reentry Council coordinated and leveraged existing federal resources that were targeted to reentry, used the bully pulpit to dispel myths, clarified policies and provided visibility to programs and policies that work, and reduced the policy barriers to successful reentry. The council was recognized in a 2014 GAO report as one of four model interagency collaborations, and the council’s collective work at the federal level—detailed in this fact sheet—has set a positive example for many states, several of which have started similar councils.

The bipartisan Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA), signed by President Obama on July 22, 2014, created a new vision for how America prepares an educated and skilled workforce that expands opportunities for workers and employers.

The 21st-century public workforce development system created through WIOA builds closer ties between business leaders, state and local Workforce Development Boards, labor unions, community colleges, non-profit organizations, youth-serving organizations, and state and local officials to deliver a more job-driven approach to training and skills development.

These final regulations provide the foundation upon which services to individuals and businesses can be strengthened and improved over time.

In October 2022, the U.S. Department of Education published final regulations for the federal Pell Grant program that promote accountability, expand college access to students who are incarcerated, and strengthen protection for veterans, service members, students, and borrowers.

This fact sheet includes additional details on the major provisions of the rule and changes made in response to public comment.

The Incarceration Nations Network (INN) developed this toolkit to push for long-term systemic change that moves spending away from futile punishment and devastating harm and toward community justice. This toolkit describes what this effort looks like in the context of the United States. 

This study helps to explain how the use of the criminal history box on college applications and the supplemental requirements and procedures that follow create barriers to higher education for otherwise qualified applicants. In this study, which focuses on the State University of New York (SUNY), we found that almost two out of every three applicants who disclosed a felony conviction were denied access to higher education, not because of a purposeful denial of their application but because they were driven out of the application process.