Please see the just-released special issue of Liminalities dedicated to Performance Praxis in Carceral Spaces. Edited by Kamran Afary, Greg Langner, and Allen Burnett, the issue centers performance as survival, disruption, and collective imagining across carceral contexts.
Founded in 2005, Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies is an open-access, peer-reviewed multimedia publication that addresses three needs in performance studies scholarship and practice: 1) expanding opportunities to share peer-reviewed work, 2) creating a space for the…
A growing body of research documents the barriers faced by incarcerated students—such as limited access to technology and conflicts with correctional staff—but far less attention has been paid to the role of the built environment in shaping educational experiences. This project, led by Ennead Lab and Ithaka S+R, examines how spatial, architecture, and design features impact learning inside prisons. It draws on qualitative interviews with formerly incarcerated students and prison education program staff, and site visits to five correctional facilities, to advance both research findings and…
Grand Hyatt Washington - Washington, DC
Wednesday, June 4, 3:30 p.m. ET through Saturday, June 7, 2025, 12:00 p.m. ET
Join us this summer in Washington, D.C., for the Second Annual Prison Education Program (PEP) Convening, hosted by The National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators (NASFAA). This in-person convening will focus on the administration of higher education programs in prison and the critical services they provide to incarcerated students.
…The New England Prison Education Collaborative is preparing to host the first of our quarterly virtual workshops in March, “Conducting a Higher Education in Prison Needs Analysis: Varied Approaches and Perspectives.”
Date and Time: March 19th, 2025, from 3:00- 4:30 PM EST.
Registration Link: https://lp.constantcontactpages.com/ev/reg/d3dzhr5
Location: Zoom
Event Details…
Ithaka S+R designed a playbook to help correctional education leaders center student learning as they navigate the education technology landscape. The guide, created with support from Ascendium Education Group and in dialogue with several correctional education leaders, provides decision-making tools and frameworks to assist leaders as they consider how to implement new education technology in prisons.
The playbook includes:
- A framework to help correctional…
On September 30, 2024, Ithaka S+R released a new research report exploring how colleges and community organizations partner to provide reentry services.
The following text was posted on the Ithaka S+R blog to announce publication.
When revised federal Pell Grant regulations went into effect in July of 2023, one of the provisions stipulated that college in prison programs would be obliged to document how they provide reentry services…
The Office of Correctional Education was created through an Act of Congress in 1991 to oversee and coordinate prison education programs as a way to reduce recidivism (Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Applied Technology Education Act, 1990). However, correctional education completion rates are extremely low. Therefore, we used secondary data from the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies survey to show that students in prison would benefit from developmental and student supports. Survey data represented 1,319 prisoners and 8,670 from the household population. We used…
This research paper examines the development and administration of Hudson Link for Higher Education in Prison, an in-prison college program run and staffed primarily by its own formerly incarcerated graduates. This paper also explores the impact of lived experience on managing and teaching in the program, as well as strategies for academic partners looking to best support interventions led by those who are closest to the problem and, in turn, closest to the solution.
This research report offers findings to guide discussions with program administrators, faculty, and formerly incarcerated students on how to improve student access, curriculum choice, retention, and completion. To see how SUNY programs serve people in New York prisons and after they leave incarceration, SUNY’s Office of Higher Education in Prison (SUNY HEP) created a longitudinal data system that links regularly collected student data from the SUNY Institutional Research Information System (SIRIS) and the National Student Clearinghouse with individual-level corrections data from DOCCS.…
This resource brief explores the limitations of recidivism as a measure of reentry success and why other outcomes should be measured. It identifies alternative outcome measures and data sources that reentry programs can use to gauge program effectiveness and participant progress in areas relevant to their respective programs. It also discusses the importance of engaging people with direct reentry experience—either as program participants or staff—in defining meaningful outcome measures.
