San Francisco Public Library’s Jail and Reentry Services librarians and information workers conducted a literature review of
academic articles, books and book chapters, and popular materials related to this topic published from January of 2020 to December of 2022.
Literacy Sponsorship in Carceral Contexts
The California Rehabilitation Center (CRC) Writing Center Handbook
Edited by Kimberly Drake, Molly Yeselson, Damian Busby, and James Avila
This book is a short sample of the Handbook created for writing center inside the California Rehabilitation Center with Scripps College. In this book, the writers acknowledge that violent literacy sponsors play roles in a larger network of intersectional oppressions, and that beginning with early literacy education, these sponsors indoctrinate students into accepting a particular place in a…
The past few years we have heard about Pell grants that are allowing those in prison to attend college. There are many who do not qualify for the prison programs. Some women do not have a high school education or a GED. In some places, prison rules exclude some women from college programs. For example, Ohio used to have a rule that prisoners had to be within five years of the parole board to attend college.
Here is my question: What benefits are the women in college programs getting and how can those benefits be extended to the women who are not in college? I am presenting on this…
Advancing Pretrial Policy & Research:
The Center for Effective Public Policy and partners are holding a Participatory Pretrial Training Session on the collective wisdom and evidence-based pretrial reform efforts published in CEPP's Gender Justice Pretrial Toolkit. This initiative was composed in collaboration with USM Opportunity Scholars with input from my currently and formerly incarcerated MCC Sisters Linda Small, Darlene George, and yours truly as CEPP Gender Justice Policy Advisors.
With…
We are excited to announce that the interest form and onboarding process for the Higher Education in Prison (HEP) Orientation program is now open!
This professional development opportunity is designed to enhance the skills of faculty, staff, and stakeholders working in prison education programs. Participants will engage in interactive modules, group discussions, and hands-on activities aimed at building strong learning communities within carceral spaces. Participants will have the chance to collaborate with student body representatives…
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 article discusses results published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and University of Massachusetts Lowell of a two-year study of Brave Behind Bars, MIT's web design program for incarcerated students. The qualitative study evaluated the effects of teaching HTML and JavaScript to incarcerated students, highlighting a notable increase in their self-confidence and digital competencies—key factors in reducing recidivism, or the rate at which people who are released return to prison.
With support from the Ascendium Education Group and the Ichigo Foundation, Jobs for the Future’s Center for Justice & Economic Advancement is excited to launch the Normalizing Education Collective (the Collective), a year-long community of practice designed to support non-profit postsecondary institutions nationwide as they explore building or expanding high-quality postsecondary pathways in prison that…
Hi everyone,
I am a PhD student in Computer Science at UC San Diego, and my research focus is improving computer science higher education in prisons. I recently published a research report at a computing education research conference (ACM SIGCSE), which I wanted to share here to get feedback from the HEP community and connect with others doing similar work.
Here is the abstract:
Efforts to bring incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals into the field of computing stand to improve equitable…
Ithaka S+R has released a new report examining how the interstitial nature of higher education in prison programs, caught between correctional and college systems, puts increased pressure on educators and students on the inside. This, in turn, creates self-censorship concerns and surveillance issues, and raises questions about the equity of educational experience on the inside.
