Since Pell Grants have become available to people pursuing degrees from prison, every state and the Federal Bureau of Prisons has tried to expand access to higher education.
What they haven’t all done, however, is create a learning environment that supports college-level study. Some states still ban inmates from almost all technology, leaving students to get by with textbooks and paper assignments. Others don’t give students computers, forcing them to write term papers on tablets that lack external keyboards. When students have the right technology, internet access becomes the barrier, as safety risks surrounding how people might abuse it outweigh educational opportunity.
Getting a degree is one of the best ways to reduce the chances of ending up back in prison after release. Some researchers have clocked precipitous drops in the recidivism rate, as this metric is called, because of educational progress and its connection to landing a good job.
But the United States’ punitive approach to incarceration clashes with the promise education holds for lower recidivism. Bidhan Roy, the director of the prison education program at Cal State Los Angeles, has studied the restorative approach in Norwegian prisons and highlights the contrast.
“The concept in Norway is that the time that you serve is the punishment, and the job of the prison is to prepare the resident to become your neighbor again,” Roy said. “When you think about it like that, it changes the goal of what you do in there. Why would you not give research skills and internet access?”
Slow progress
When Roy started developing Cal State L.A.’s Prison Graduation Initiative about a decade ago, students had to do all their work on paper. To give the incarcerated students a way to conduct research, Roy would pair them with an on-campus peer who could go to the library on their behalf and print out materials for Roy to bring back inside the prison. Once students started using desktops from prison classrooms, he pre-loaded academic articles onto thumb drives they could explore offline. Since the fall of 2023, his students have been able to search a much wider universe of academic articles online through EBSCO, a company that aggregates online research databases. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation purchased EBSCO access for students at all of the state’s prisons.
Little by little, Roy’s classes have improved for both instructors and students. Grading handwritten essays, he said, was a nightmare in itself. And students have blossomed as scholars with the power to set their own research agendas — a level of autonomy that contrasts sharply with their otherwise hypercontrolled lives inside.
“There’s an empowerment that comes from that, and a learning of not just the narrow research skill, but the broader bits,” Roy said.
Still, students run into walls.
Suzanne Carlson, 42, received her GED in prison and then went on to get two associate degrees before joining the bachelor’s degree program Roy oversees. When she started taking classes, they were with textbooks and paper only.
“It was awful,” she said. She loves and appreciates the laptop she has now at the California Institution for Women in Chino, but the EBSCO database gives her access to only pre-approved resources and “the library here is very small in comparison to the things that we need,” she said. She finds herself wishing she had a Google equivalent to do her work.
“I understand why [that’s not available] and I wouldn’t want to open any avenues for criminal behavior to happen,” Carlson said, but she is sure there’s a way to prohibit criminal activity while still opening up more of the web to people who are incarcerated.
In fact, other states have figured it out. Kansas, Ohio and Wisconsin all have firewalled internet options for students on a separate network that keeps the prison’s network safe and still gets students access to educationally relevant websites.
“We’d love to see more states headed in that direction,” said Ruth Delaney, who directs the Unlocking Potential Initiative at the Vera Institute, a criminal justice nonprofit. The initiative aims to expand high-quality post-secondary education in prison and Delaney’s team has worked with departments of corrections as well as education leaders in most states since 2012. Their early outcomes inspired the Obama administration to allow some low-income students to access Pell Grants even while incarcerated, eventually leading to full restoration of Pell Grants to this population. Congress approved that expansion during the first Trump administration and it took effect in 2023.
Still, even under the best circumstances, incarcerated students are broadly kept away from much of the human knowledge housed online. Unlike in K-12 schools, where filters are designed to restrict student access to dangerous or inappropriate websites and otherwise let students browse freely — a blacklist approach — prisons operate with whitelists: facilities identify specific sites users can access and the rest of the internet is blocked.
Both methods keep students from more websites than necessary to maintain order and safety. In K-12 schools, The Markup, now a part of CalMatters, found high schools kept students from sex education websites, LGBTQ+ resources, Wikipedia and a wide range of other websites they sought out while doing homework. In prisons, Delaney said, the whitelist approach leads to “a very closed-down version of the internet.”
For students who are incarcerated, the limitations co-opt their educational opportunity. Carlson finished her bachelor’s degree this spring but worries the credential won’t get her as far as she’d like.
“When I go into the career world when I get out and I go to apply for a job and I work next to others, I don’t want to have stunted growth because of things like this,” Carlson said.
National trends
Last year, the Vera Institute released a report about the quality, equity and scale of prison education, assessing each state’s progress across 15 metrics. Two measures of quality were technology and academic research and library access. California received a “green” on both measures, a sign that its system offered “adequate” access, but Carlson’s research experiences illustrate the limits of “adequate.”
Nationwide, the Vera Institute named technology an area to improve. Only 17 states were labeled “adequate” for providing technology that shrinks the digital divide and supports the quality of education. Just 12 hit the same mark when it comes to providing access to academic research materials and library services.
Meanwhile, in 2016, the United States signed onto a revision to the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, naming internet access a fundamental human right with ties to the right to education.
Delaney said prison administrators often fear internet access for students could lead to violence or harm either inside or outside the prison. But she said the fear, although legitimate, appears to be overblown.
“There is a lot of evidence that people who go to college in prison are not involved in the activities you need to worry about,” Delaney said. Students qualify for prison education programs only once they have a record of good behavior, and even minor infractions can get them kicked out. They take the opportunity seriously.
Joe Tragert, vice president of product strategy at EBSCOed, EBSCO’s education division, helped create a prison version of EBSCO’s database of research resources, which holds over a billion items, including academic articles and media archives that users can search. In the prisons, users can only read and download the resources once they’ve been approved, but they can conduct their own searches and request access to documents. Tragert said he hears how dedicated people are to pursuing their degrees.
“This is their ticket to either getting out and staying out or just getting through the day,” Tragert said.
Limited opportunity
Theresa Torricellas, 66, completed her bachelor’s degree in liberal studies this spring through Roy’s program at the California Institution for Women. She said EBSCO was her main research resource and although it was full of sources, she ran into dead ends trying to study conditions for Palestinians last summer.
“A lot of the information that I’m interested in, it’s just not in the media,” Torricellas said at the time. “It’s very rarely covered in the media.” On the outside, she said she probably would have turned to social media for her research. On the inside, that wasn’t an option.
She also ran into problems with Wi-Fi access when she was working on her schoolwork. Wi-Fi is available only in designated common areas and the cells that happen to be close enough to pick up that signal. She lucked out for a while, but when she moved across the hall to get a cell with better sunlight, it didn’t occur to her she might be leaving her Wi-Fi access behind. She discovered that only after it was too late.
This past academic year, her routine was to go to the noisy dayroom to search EBSCO for documents she needed or log into her course software to download assignment details and then go back to her room to continue working offline. Interrupting this workflow was the limited storage space on the prison-issued laptops.
“My laptop stopped working because I had downloaded so many EBSCO articles,” Torricellas said. Another person in the prison education program said the same thing happened to her after downloading only two large PDFs, but the newer laptops distributed by the prison have more space.
As the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation rolls out newer hardware, it is also expanding student access to research resources. Besides EBSCO, students are slowly gaining access to JSTOR, another searchable research database. Students studying in prisons through nearby college programs, like Roy’s, get access to the JSTOR database through the college’s existing license, meaning it’s already paid for.
Stacy Burnett, who directs the JSTOR Access in Prison Initiative, said many prisons offer an approach like EBSCO’s, where someone has to review and approve each student request for a document. Others have expanded access with a bulk approval tool. In some cases, state prison systems have bulk-approved an entire discipline; in Colorado, officials bulk-approved everything in JSTOR.
“If it’s on there, a student can read it,” Burnett said. They can restrict access following a problem, but so far, Burnett said that hasn’t happened.
When Carlson got to prison, she was shocked by the low education levels of the women around her. She went to a rigorous high school and learned how to read, write and conduct research. Others didn’t learn any of those skills. EBSCO and JSTOR offer a way to further their education inside. But Carlson said limited access to online research just compounds the lack of education many women received in the first place.
“I feel like when it comes to education,” Carlson said, “the doors should be wide open.”
Tara García Mathewson writes for CalMatters, where this article originally ran.
