Congress Weighs In: Higher Education in Prison

The systemic disparities within our nation reproduce inequities as to who can access higher education. For example, racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to be involved with the criminal justice system. This is partially due to punitive K–12 school disciplinary policies that disproportionately punish students of color, deterring them from higher education pathways.¹ In addition, inequities of access to quality K–12 educational and economic opportunities² act as sorting and sifting mechanisms to determine who is granted access to postsecondary education. In the context of prisons, a combination of limited funding, limited space, bureaucratic resistance to modernizing technology, outdated facilities, distant location from educational providers, and political resistance function as powerful socializing forces that exclude incarcerated populations from higher education.

However, the Higher Education Act initially allowed incarcerated adults to be eligible for Pell Grants, the federal government’s primary source of need-based aid for low-income college students. As a result, hundreds of college-in-prison programs emerged across the nation. Some states (like New York, for example) had a college-in-prison program in just about every state correctional facility by the early 1990s.³ By 1993, about 23,000 students in federal and state prisons were supported by the Pell Grant.⁴ Although these grants impacted a substantial incarcerated population, spending on incarcerated adults eligible for Pell Grants made up less than 1 percent of the financial aid program’s total annual budget.⁵

Despite the fact that a minute fraction of Pell dollars supported those in prison, a false narrative began to pick up momentum: the Pell Grant for incarcerated individuals was taking away funds from students at traditional college campuses.⁶ This intense debate led to legislation in 1992, where Pell Grant eligibility was removed for individuals on death row or serving a life sentence without parole.⁷ Two years later, then-President Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control & Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which prohibited all incarcerated adults in federal and state prisons from receiving Pell Grants.⁸ The crime bill, short for the Violent Crime Control & Law Enforcement Act of 1994, was the catalyst for dismantling college-in-prison programs, since it removed the main funding source for these programs.⁹

Within a year of the crime bill’s passage, participation in college-in-prison programs decreased by 44 percent.¹² Part of the reason that the decline was so drastic was that many states quickly followed the federal government’s lead by reducing state funding for correctional postsecondary education.¹³ Low state appropriations for correctional postsecondary education persist today. A recent review of federal policies and state laws found that many states explicitly prohibit incarcerated adults in state prisons from receiving state financial aid.¹⁴ The limited access to college in prisons leave incarcerated adults vulnerable to low-quality, non-credit bearing, and/or non-transferable education from predatory external providers.

“This program was through correspondence education, paper-based. I go through the program [i.e. graduate] but find out the school was not accredited. Before starting this program, there was no process available to us to ensure the school was accredited or the transferability of the degree. …Without internal vigor or family resources to do the research for you, access to this information was nonexistent.”

—formerly incarcerated student, May 2019