and Puerto Rico have been running, like the one at Folsom. The ban on Pell Grants for prisoners caused the hundreds of college-in-prison programs that existed in the 1970s and 1980s to go almost entirely extinct by the late nineties.Ĭongress voted to lift the ban in 2020, and since then about 200 Pell-eligible college programs in 48 states, Washington D.C. The rate doubled for white Americans in the same time span. When the Obama administration offered a limited number of Pell Grants to prisoners through executive action in 2015, some prominent Republicans opposed it, arguing in favor of improving the existing federal job training and re-entry programs instead.The 1990s saw imprisonment rates for Black and Hispanic Americans triple between 19. Using taxpayer money to give college aid to people who’ve broken the law can be controversial. “I would say that return on investment is better than anything I’ve ever invested in,” Zuckerman said. If a prisoner paroles with a degree, never reoffends, gets a job earning a good salary and pays taxes, then the expansion of prison education shouldn’t be a hard sell, said David Zuckerman, the project’s interim director. It costs about $20,000 to educate a prisoner with a bachelor’s degree program through the Transforming Outcomes Project at Sacramento State, or TOPSS. “So when I came into prison and I saw an opportunity to go to college, I took it.”Ĭonsider this: It costs roughly $106,000 per year to incarcerate one adult in California.
“The last day I talked to him, he was telling me, I should go back to college,” Massey said.
The new rules, which overturn a 1994 ban on Pell Grants for prisoners, begin to address decades of policy during the “tough on crime” 1970s-2000 that brought about mass incarceration and stark racial disparities in the nation’s 1.9 million prison population.
That program is about to expand exponentially next month, giving about 30,000 more students behind bars some $130 million in financial aid per year. Thousands of prisoners throughout the United States get their college degrees behind bars, most of them paid for by the federal Pell Grant program, which offers the neediest undergraduates tuition aid that they don’t have to repay. Their black commencement garb almost hid their aqua and navy-blue prison uniforms as they received college degrees, high school diplomas and vocational certificates earned while they served time. They marched to the stage – one surrounded by barbed wire fence and constructed by fellow prisoners.įor these were no ordinary graduates. As the graduation march played, the 85 men appeared to hoots and cheers from their families. REPRESA, California - The graduates lined up, brushing off their gowns and adjusting classmates’ tassels and stoles.
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