Inside-Out College-In-Prison Program

The Center for the Study of Correctional Education at CSUSB has teamed up with Pitzer College’s Inside-Out Prison Education program to expand opportunities for incarcerated people to take credit-bearing college courses. This unique program brings together incarcerated (inside) students and traditional, non-incarcerated (outside) students for a transformative learning experience in a correctional facility. We believe that society is strengthened when higher education and learning is made widely accessible and, at the same time, when it allows participants to encounter each other as equals, often across profound social barriers. The practice of bringing incarcerated (inside) and non-incarcerated (outside) people together for engaged dialogue allows for transformative learning experiences that invite participants to take leadership in addressing issues of social concern.

The benefits of this model of prison education are clear: CSUSB students gain the opportunity to engage in high-impact educational practices (such as community-based learning, collaborative inquiry, structured learning communities, and opportunities for encountering diverse perspectives) and students who are incarcerated have the opportunity to deeply impact their lives during and post-incarceration. College-in-prison programs strengthen local communities and families by reducing rates of recidivism—a 50-state survey by the Institute for Higher Education Policy found that recidivism rates for incarcerated people who had participated in prison education programs were on average 46% lower than the rates of incarcerated people who had not taken college classes.

We affirm that education is a human right, and we are working to make educational opportunities widely available to all members of our community. Your contributions are necessary to help us defray tuition expenses and expand this effort for incarcerated students.

Students at CSUSB have routinely expressed interest in learning about and supporting prison education. When I started an internship program at the CSCE for students to engage in research projects related to incarceration and education, there was always far more interest from students than available spots, which indicates that CSUSB students see this work as incredibly valuable. Each time I have offered a course on prison education, they have filled up quickly, many times requiring a waitlist. We recently expanded this internship program to include teaching opportunities inside the California Rehabilitation Center. At the end of her internship, one student (who has since gone on to gain employment as a tutor for Chaffey College’s prison education program) wrote, “Ultimately, I truly believe that…working at the California Rehabilitation Center has made me a better teacher, a better student, and a better advocate. I value any opportunity to both teach and learn alongside other students and working with this group of students was no exception. I went in with some concern for the issue of mass incarceration, but now that I have seen it firsthand, I can’t think of a more important way to spend my time as a literacy educator.”

Additional funding would allow us to expand this important work and enable us to pay for the tuition of the second cohort of students to enroll in our Public and Professional Writing Certificate Program.