MIT is holding an event to gather professors, students, policy makers, and members of the business community to discuss equitable hiring practices and the barriers that individuals from marginalized communities face in the socioeconomic and professional arenas. This event is to discuss and improve public support for second chance hiring practices for formerly incarcerated individuals, and will be featuring the story of Daniel Dart, MIT's first formerly incarcerated student at the Sloan School of Business.
MIT Sloan EMBA student Daniel Dart, EMBA '24, is a leader in Second…
With a submission deadline of May 1, 2024, The Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities is soliciting manuscripts for their journal on the role of higher education in prison and returning citizens on campuses and communities. The purpose of this issue's theme is to gain insight into how higher education institutions address prison education, transition, and reentry for incarcerated students.
The topic suggestions for content are fairly broad, but all must include evidence-based theories or practice with supportive data.
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This toolkit from the State University of New York (SUNY) Higher Education for the Justice-Involved (HEJI) program serves as a guide for administrators in recruiting and training staff for their prison education programs.
The first goal of this document is to help guide programs through developing, hiring, and training practices that can support quality programming inside the correctional facility. The second goal is to generate a larger conversation about what programs consider to be best practices and how hiring, training, and supporting faculty contribute to the overall…
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.
In this radio segment from NPR and WBUR's Here & Now, Deepa Fernandes speaks with Jennifer Lackey, the founding director of the Northwestern Prison Education Program. This segment runs approximately 8 minutes and 50 seconds.
This article from Reuters announces the graduation of the first class of incarcerated students from Northwestern University's Prison Education Program on November 15, 2023.
"Twenty years ago, some of these guys were in rival gangs, and here they are swapping poetry with each other and giving critical engagements on sociology assignments," said Professor Jennifer Lackey, the program's founding director. "The love and growth that we see in the community is really unlike anything I've experienced at the on-campus commencements."
This article from Illinois Public Media covers the passage of the Higher Education in Prison Act in the Illinois legislature.
The state will now provide annual public data on enrollment, demographics, and waitlists for higher education programs in Illinois prisons.
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…
This news article from Open Campus highlights key takeaways from the 2023 National Conference for Higher Education in Prison (NCHEP).
This four-part, Emmy-nominated PBS documentary offers an intimate look at the lives and experiences of a dozen incarcerated students participating in the Bard Prison Initiative and their families. The documentary confronts and challenges conventional wisdom about the purpose of both education and incarceration.
