September Shared Offering: Education Justice Project

September’s Shared Offering is the Education Justice Project (EJP), at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Under the inspiration and direction of Dr. Rebecca Ginsburg (Professor of Landscape Architecture), the EJP offers upper-level university courses and related activities to incarcerated people in Illinois. The related activities include tutoring, an on-site resource room, bilingual Spanish-English instruction, book clubs, a speaker series, and support for a network of families of EJP students. The program currently operates at the Danville Correctional Facility for men. Nearly all staff in the program are trained volunteers from the university and the local community. The program is grounded in a well substantiated body of research. College-in-prison programs reduce arrest, conviction, and reincarceration rates among released prisoners. College-in-prison programs are also linked to fewer disciplinary incidents within prison and thus safer environments for prisoners and staff alike. College-in-prison programs also have benefits for inmates’ families and, hence, their communities. The strongest predictor of whether a given person will attend college is whether her or his parents did. So, when an incarcerated person receives a college education, his or her children are more likely to pursue their own educations. In spite of these significant benefits, there has been a precipitous drop in college-in-prison programs around the country. There were over seven hundred degree-granting programs at their height, in the early 1990s. In 1994 the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act eliminated the use of Pell Grants for prisoners, and most prison college programs closed, including Illinois’ BA-granting programs. Bachelor degrees have not been offered in Illinois prisons since 2002. The EJP is a vital program, seeking long-term responses to chronic structural problems like crime and incarceration, both of which disproportionately affect the poor and people of color in our society. Please check out the website http://www.educationjustice.net/ or ask Jennifer Greene for further information.