Policy Implications/Recommendations

Here are five recommendations with federal, state, and local policy implications to suggest a new, smarter approach to reentry, one that begins while individuals are serving their time, and that prioritizes postsecondary education and job training opportunities:

Increase Access

Increase the availability of quality postsecondary education and meaningful job training opportunities. As an empirically proven rehabilitative program to prepare individuals with skills necessary for active participation in the labor market, postsecondary education should be viewed as an integral part of rehabilitation within correctional facilities. Prisons should actively expand their educational programming to include postsecondary education that provides pathways to formal degrees and certificates.

This expansion primarily requires the federal government and states to reevaluate policies that have limited funding for such opportunities. These federal and state policies heavily impact what types of programming is available to incarcerated adults within prison systems. Both states and the federal government must amend policies that deny access to higher education and reshape financing programs to expand postsecondary opportunities in a model that is conducive to a prison context. Congress has made some progress on this front, authorizing a small portion (up to 2 percent) of federal dollars to states for Career and Technical Education (CTE) under the Perkins Act, including postsecondary programs.¹ But more must be done to reach the millions of incarcerated adults interested in pursuing higher education. An appropriate funding model would ensure that delivery of postsecondary education to incarcerated students neither perpetuates inequities in educational quality nor denies access to academically eligible individuals who want to participate.

As job training will continue to be one of the major program offerings within prisons, curriculum and learning outcomes must align with the necessary skills for the 21st century labor market. Correctional job training programs should continue to evolve to better align with professional and trade careers.

However, the portability of job training programs is complex, as the occupational barriers for formerly incarcerated adults vary from state to state. Job training should prepare incarcerated individuals for occupations for which they are legally allowed to enter.² Although some states provide waivers to allow qualified individuals employment, other states do not. The complexity is amplified for those within the Federal Bureau of Prisons system, where there is a higher likelihood of being released in a different state from the state in which the correctional job training has been given. In these instances, individuals could possibly be trained for an occupation they are banned from practicing, contingent upon the state they are released. Collaboration between the reentry process and correctional programming is critical.

Job training programs should also align with regional labor market needs. To accommodate the dynamic nature of labor-market needs, federal and state correctional systems should conduct intermittent labor market evaluations as a means of continuous improvement and adjust their programs as needed.

Increase the choice of educational providers to incarcerated populations. A majority of currently incarcerated students, federal and state correctional administrators, college-in-prison facilitators, and experts in the field we spoke with believe increasing choice in educational providers within prisons would be a good idea. One currently incarcerated student told us, “Like we learned in our economics class, not having a competitive market for education is not a good thing. How will colleges be motivated to do better if they know they are the only option?”

For the few facilities in the country that have college programs, students are typically limited to the quality and educational experience of the sole provider that operates in their facility, which is particularly problematic when few quality guardrails are in place to ensure the college program is high-quality and course offerings are comparable to on-campus programs. Students are restricted in their selection of courses, majors and degrees, professors, and more. They generally cannot shop around and select a college based on factors like quality and cost. And waiting lists to participate in the only available college program get longer and longer. While some currently incarcerated students worry that more educational providers could crowd out existing high-quality college programs, take up high-demand space, and drive up costs, expanding the choice of educational providers within prisons may help to scale up the promise of higher education.

Guidance to Leveraging Credentials

Provide opportunities to ensure correctional postsecondary programs lead to pathways to earn formal degrees. Unfortunately, not all correctional postsecondary education programs position adults to seamlessly earn formal degrees and certificates either during incarceration or after release that are essential for career entry and professional advancement. It is important for incarcerated adults to have opportunities to leverage their educational experience post-release to continue their education, with the agency of choice in their educational pursuits, just as traditional college students do. This calls for a radical shift of universal access to credit-bearing, transferable degrees that lend the option for incarcerated students to continue their education post-release. One model is stackable credentials, a sequence of certificates and degrees that a student can accumulate over time,³ applying the credits to avoid repeating coursework and extending beyond associate degrees.

During our prison-site visits, we met some students participating in the Second Chance Pell program who were accumulating multiple associate degrees. A stackable credential model could allow incarcerated students to earn credits and credentials and deter programs from encouraging students from continuing to pursue multiple programs at the same level, with non-stackable credits, which could put them at a disadvantage in the long run. One student pointed out: “Getting a[n associate] degree has become more realistic because I’ll be halfway to a bachelor’s and now [a bachelor’s degree] feels more attainable.”

Within federal and state correctional facilities, education provided along a continuum will accommodate the varying educational needs of the students, allow clearer pathways to a degree, and help students to make meaningful progress in the accumulation of valuable credentials. For example, Michigan’s Transfer Agreement allows students to earn a 30-credit certificate while incarcerated, and then transfer those credits to a state community college to continue their education post-release (though the program does not allow stackable credentials during incarceration).⁴ Stackable credentials would allow students to earn credits on the pathway to a formal degree during their prison sentence and then have the option to transfer to a campus upon release.

Additionally, while job training programs within prisons typically issue a certificate from either the Federal Bureau of Prisons or from a given state’s department of corrections, those certificates are not industry-recognized credentials. To provide meaningful opportunities for adults to leverage the credentials they earn while in prison, correctional programs should shift to awarding industry-recognized credentials comparable to certificates individuals receive outside of prison.

Make postsecondary education and job training programs part of the reentry process. The reentry process typically begins within 12 to 18 months of an individual’s release date.⁵ For students who want to transfer and continue their education, there is a heavy reliance on family members to help with the transition—submitting online college applications and paying for them, researching programs and transfer requirements, and finding a college in the area where the student will be released.

While family support is critical to incarcerated populations, the entire burden should not rest with the family, especially since not all incarcerated students have family support, or family members who are familiar with the postsecondary education system. Most of the individuals we spoke with are the first in their families to pursue a college education. The criminal justice system should collaborate with community-based organizations and auxiliary programs, such as higher education institutions, to maintain individuals’ educational growth post-release.

Where students transfer is contingent upon the community in which they are paroled, yet these two intertwined processes of release and college transfer are rarely connected. This was confirmed from speaking with a staff member of a college-in-prison program we visited. “We [at the college-in-prison program] don’t have a robust reentry process to support students besides writing a letter to the board [for parole] on their behalf. It’s mainly individuals doing the work of finding a college to transfer to in the community [where] they will be released.”

A college-reentry liaison at the correctional facility could assist those interested in continuing their education immediately after release. The liaison could inform students of the necessary classes and documents to transfer to a campus, assist students with completing online applications, identify transferable credits, and collaborate to identify and ensure a local college is in the location of release. A college-reentry liaison is critical for incarcerated students in the federal corrections system, in particular, where they are more than likely to have a geographic mismatch between the state where they are released and the state where they were enrolled in coursework during incarceration. A consortium or college-in-prison network across the country may be able to alleviate this barrier by establishing agreements to allow students to transfer and continue their education at partner institutions upon release.

For job training programs, a workforce liaison to assist individuals with finding employment is also critical. This liaison should form partnerships with employers across various industries to inform incarcerated adults of the current labor demands in the community of their release and guide individuals to apply for jobs during their sentence. The ideal collaboration between the reentry process and job training programs would transfer their industry-recognized certificate into a job-offer upon release.

Ensure Equity and Quality of Correctional College Programs

Recommendations for reinstating Pell Grants for incarcerated populations. Speaking with currently incarcerated students, federal and state correctional education administrators, college facilitators, and instructors, the recurring moral and political question they are often challenged with is whether those behind bars should be afforded the privilege to access higher education.

With growing bipartisan support behind reinstating Pell Grants for currently incarcerated adults to expand access to higher education, our findings suggest that policymakers should be careful to anticipate and address possible unintended consequences on equity and quality. Currently, 66 educational providers around the country are actively involved in the Second Chance Pell experiment, which is run by the U.S. Department of Education. A stipulation of Pell Grant eligibility for the pilot program is that students must eventually be eligible for release from prison, with priority to students who will be released within five years of enrollment in the program.⁶ However, we have seen from the PIAAC data that those closest to reentry (fewer than two years) are not more or less likely to enroll or show interest in college programs. Furthermore, those who are close to reentry are not more or less likely to graduate from college programs compared to individuals with longer and indeterminate sentences. And given longstanding racial disparities in both imprisonment and sentencing, this provision likely disproportionately harms people of color, denying them access to continued education.

For these reasons, federal investments in correctional postsecondary education should not limit program eligibility to individuals nearing release or eligible for parole. Policymakers should reevaluate the merits of denying eligibility on the basis of reentry status, and ensure all academically qualified individuals have access to higher education while incarcerated. A college-in-prison facilitator we spoke to cautioned against such restrictions, stating, “When you begin to exclude based on additional criteria, it creates conflict and resentment and you miss an opportunity to transform the culture of the prison. Prisons already are a culture of conflict, so why add more with a program that has the potential to have many great benefits.”

While reinstating Pell Grants to currently incarcerated adults will help to address the need for greater access to higher education, guardrails should be in place to ensure this vulnerable population of students is not harmed by the unintended consequences of Second Chance Pell. First and foremost, institutions should apply for the privilege to offer these programs, rather than being presumed eligible. Establishing a college-in-prison program should require jumping significant hurdles, implementing mission-driven practices, and building cooperative relationships across the institution and the facility. Those should be in place well before a student enters the classroom, and before she or he begins to spend down their limited Pell Grant dollars. Eligible institutions should be subject to continued monitoring and evaluation to assess the outcomes of their incarcerated students, and Pell Grant eligibility should be revoked where colleges fail to serve students well. Even within the context of the current experiment, our prison site visits revealed students were largely unaware of their participation in the experiment and risks of their program, such as wasted or spent-down federal aid money that will no longer be available to them upon release. Students should be full participants in the pilot, with adequate knowledge of the risks and benefits. Institutions and programs should be held accountable to ensure the dissemination of this information, the quality of education being offered, and their commitment to serve this population of students.