Transforming cellblocks into classrooms

When the 1994 Crime Bill eliminated Pell Grant eligibility for incarcerated students, higher education programs in prisons across the country plummeted dramatically from nearly 1,000opens in new window in the 1990s to just 12 by 2005. That changed in July 2023 when Pell Grant eligibility was restoredopens in new window as part of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) Simplification Act—opening doors to college for roughly 750,000 incarcerated people, according to the Vera Institute of Justiceopens in new window. As a consequence, there has been an upsurge in colleges and universities partnering with correctional facilities to offer credited courses and degree programs that duplicate what is available on campus.

Although funding increased with last spring’s passage of H.R. 1, or the One Big Beautiful Act, two new rules will limit access: Pell Grants can’t be added if other aid fully covers tuition, and a new short-term job training program, Workforce Pell, requires job placement—virtually impossible for incarcerated students still serving time.

The Alliance for Higher Education in Prisonopens in new window reports more than 400 higher education initiatives across nearly 600 correctional facilities as of November 2025. Psychology faculty have played a particularly active role in these initiatives, teaching courses that explore human behavior, mental health, and social systems in spaces often defined by isolation. For many faculty members, that work has helped reinvigorate their own sense of purpose as educators while also reshaping these students’ lives.

There is ongoing debate about whether courses in psychology offer tangible employment benefits compared with business or information technology for formerly incarcerated people upon their release. Mara Sanchez, PhD, programs director for the alliance, says that students in correctional settings deserve access to the same breadth of course options available to any college student. “While it is important to connect higher education with meaningful career pathways, I can see psychology as building skills that employers see as critical, such as communication, conflict resolution, teamwork, and problem-solving,” she said.

The United States incarcerates more people than nearly any other nation in the world, with close to 1.25 million peopleopens in new window confined in prisons across the country. Mass incarceration has far-reaching social and psychological consequences. Decades of research have shown that correctional education is one of the strongest tools for reducing recidivism and improving reentry outcomes.

A meta-analysis of 37 years of research found that people who participated in prison education programs were 32% less likely to return to prison than those who did not (Bozick, R., et al., Journal of Experimental Criminology, Vol. 14, 2018opens in new window). Another meta-analysis revealed that college or postsecondary education was more effective at decreasing recidivism—by 41.5%—compared with vocational education (15.6%), secondary education or GED (12.5%), and adult basic education (3.3%) (Stickle, B., & Sprick Schuster, S., American Journal of Criminal Justice, Vol. 48, 2023opens in new window).

Before entering any correctional facility to teach, faculty must undergo background checks and learn security procedures. Security personnel are required to escort faculty through the prison to the classroom, where there is always a guard nearby during instruction. Karla Vermeulen, PhD, teaches “PSY393-02: Psychology of Trauma and Loss” as part of the State University of New York (SUNY) New Paltz prison education program. She received her training virtually and was able to visit the Green Haven Correctional Facility in upstate New York to run through the security process the week before instruction began. “It was a chance to learn the security procedures and be in that environment. It takes some getting used to, but I feel perfectly safe when I’m in my classroom,” she said.

Faculty also receive training on how to behave and interact with incarcerated students. For example, instructors are advised not to look up or inquire about their students’ criminal history but rather focus on them simply as students. Heather Carella, MA, LMHC, LPC, teaches psychology courses as part of the Bachelor of Science degree offered through Mercy University at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in New York. “You’re working with humans who have made, sometimes, some awful choices. But if they’re in your class, that means that they want to learn, grow, and change their life. Just support them as best as possible along that journey,” she said.

Faculty who teach in prisons must navigate significant logistical and institutional barriers such as long drives to remote facilities, extensive security screenings, and abrupt class cancellations because of lockdowns or staffing shortages. They are encouraged to embrace unpredictability as last-minute changes and delays often occur. “I would say, go in open-minded because it is a job that will humble you very quickly,” Carella said. “You could have the most well-laid-out syllabus and calendar, and pretty much by week 3, you might have to throw it all out the window because things come up. So just be open, be flexible. You’re going to be stretched.”

The lack of digital access poses another significant challenge. Unlike their on-campus counterparts, incarcerated students cannot use the internet to search for psychological research in online databases. Textbooks and multimedia are often limited and need to be vetted by the corrections administrators. That means professors often rely on photocopied readings, handwritten assignments, and chalk or whiteboards. In an encouraging step, the Alliance for Higher Education in Prison has partnered with W. W. Norton & Companyopens in new window to donate textbooks to prison classrooms—offering some relief to educators.

Still, many instructors say the restrictions of the prison environment yield an unexpected benefit. “It’s delightful to teach in a classroom where students aren’t on their phones, and I don’t have to worry about AI-written papers,” said Vermeulen.

At the same time, these benefits don’t erase the complexity of teaching in correctional settings. One recurring theme from the psychology education and training community is the need for structured faculty development and institutional support for this work. There is much that can be learned from psychologists already doing it—their strategies for flexibility, resilience, and student engagement could inform broader conversations about preparing educators for nontraditional learning environments.

The University of Scranton Prison Education Program is part of a consortium of Jesuit institutions committed to extending higher education to incarcerated students. Launched in 2021, the program, which leads to an associate’s degree in liberal studies, is the same one offered to students at the Scranton campus. “The prison education program is basically the core curriculum of our existing Scranton bachelor’s degree,” said Carolyn Barry, PhD, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and a professor of psychology. “It is steeped in lots of humanities, which is part of our Jesuit Catholic tradition, and includes social science, quantitative, and elective courses.” The program strives to offer instruction that mirrors the high academic standards provided to other undergraduates. Graduates of their associate’s program can apply to transfer to another institution to complete a bachelor’s degree.

Christie Karpiak, PhD, a professor of psychology at Scranton, teaches fundamentals of psychology as part of the degree program for students at the State Correctional Institution Dallas in Pennsylvania. The content is identical to the course she teaches in her on-campus classroom.

“The students have been selected carefully. They apply competitively to the program, and some even move into this facility from other prisons to participate in it,” she said. The admissions process requires applicants to sit for an exam in which they write an essay in response to a prompt from the humanities. The essays are ranked by three professors, and the best applicants advance to a phone interview for assessing college readiness.

Once enrolled, most of the University of Scranton’s incarcerated students take their education seriously. Graduation rates climbed from 53% in the first cohort to 76% in the second cohort, dipping slightly to 67% in the third cohort. This compares with the national graduation rate from 4-year colleges of 50.8%, according to data from the National Center for Education Statisticsopens in new window.

In Karpiak’s classroom, 3-hour lectures often become lively debates—especially on topics like epigenetics and the effects of environment on behavior. For example, Viktor Frankl’s autobiography about being imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps, Man’s Search for Meaning, has sparked particularly intense discussions about resilience, trauma, and accountability.

The prison education experience has refined Karpiak’s approach to teaching. Preparing to answer such wide-ranging questions has pushed her to stretch her preparedness as an educator. “I have to ensure that I know the topic inside and out, drawing on all my experience,” she said. It has also influenced her on-campus teaching, inspiring her to refine her syllabus and written assignments so that her on-campus students can engage in deeper discussions of their lived experiences.

Columbia University offers courses through its prison education program to students at several correctional facilities in New York State, including Sing Sing Correctional Facility, Taconic Correctional Facility, and Queensboro Correctional Facility. Since the launch of the program in 2015, Columbia has offered credit-bearing courses to more than 1,200 incarcerated students. At the helm is Geraldine Downey, PhD, the director of Columbia’s Center for Justice and the Robert Johnston Niven Professor of Humane Letters in Psychology. Although the exact proportion of students in Columbia’s program who complete degrees is difficult to track, Downey estimates about 80% of students at Sing Sing and Taconic—two correctional facilities offering degree programs—go on to eventually earn associate or bachelor’s degrees.

Downey’s career in prison education began during her postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan, where she supported incarcerated women seeking to earn college degrees and volunteered for a program that facilitated visits between incarcerated mothers and their children. This experience profoundly influenced the development of her “Children at Risk” course that she teaches both on campus and “inside,” the colloquial term for life at the prison.

Grounded in Urie Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory, the course explores how layered social contexts shape child development. Students often connect the research to their own experiences growing up amid poverty, trauma, and limited opportunity. “One of my students said to me, ‘It’s like the book version of the streets. This gives me a framework for thinking about what we go through in our communities and the high level of adverse childhood experiences in our families—the way in which we face danger when we go outside the door, both from the police and other gangs.’ The framework for understanding what that is like comes from psychology,” Downey said. As a result, many students can think more broadly, envisioning systemic changes that could improve their children’s opportunities, Downey added.

Obtaining stable employment after release is one of the best predictors of whether a person who was formerly incarcerated will stay out of prison (Kolbeck, S., et al., Justice Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 1, 2024opens in new window). Two of Downey’s former students have used their psychology courses in prison to develop skills that helped them land jobs immediately upon release. Mujahideen Muhammad was convicted of murder at age 19 and served 24.5 years, 15 of them at Sing Sing. He earned a Bachelor of Science in science with a concentration in psychology via the Mercy University prison education program.

He took the “UN3615x: Children at Risk” as a correspondence course in 2021 during the pandemic. He said the course helped him make sense of his “development as a young person who grew up amid unfavorable circumstances,” which included being abandoned by his parents at age 6 before entering the foster care system. He eventually became involved with the justice system as a result of an attempted robbery at age 14. “Engaging in that course helped me better understand myself, society, and all of the factors that contribute to bad outcomes like a criminal conviction,” he said.

Based on the skills he acquired in his prison psychology classes and other coursework, Muhammad was hired as a research assistant by the Center for Justice after his release in 2024. His ongoing work there inspired him to cofound the nonprofit Pillars of Promiseopens in new window, which aims to change public perception of incarcerated people.

Jarrell Daniels enrolled in Downey’s “PSYC G4690y: Social Factors and Psychopathology” course while serving time at Queensboro Correctional Facility. Violence had permeated his early life. While still in elementary school, he witnessed his aunt’s throat get slashed. In middle school, his stepfather physically abused his mother for years. “Violence surrounded me. It was at home; it was in the community,” he said. “I was being taught to respond to conflicts with violence.”

In 2018, after serving 6 years on gang-related charges, Daniels went on to earn a dual bachelor’s degree in sociology and African American studies from Columbia University’s School of General Studies, graduating in 2022. He also joined the Center for Justice, where he codesigned Project Restoreopens in new window, a 12-month violence-intervention program for young adults. Bronfenbrenner’s framework heavily influenced the life-skills curriculum that Daniels designed for participants. The project helped reduce shootings by 28% among rival street crews during its pilot launch in Brooklyn, Daniels said.

Now pursuing a doctorate in psychology and social intervention at New York University, Daniels plans to teach both within and outside prison walls while continuing to evaluate public safety initiatives and policy responses to community violence. He particularly hopes “to prepare community leaders to explore higher education pathways and to engage in meaningful research that moves the field away from problematizing issues or people.”

Social psychologist Kody Manke-Miller, PhD, is one of the inaugural faculty members of the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) prison education project, which launched in 2021. The program, based on Temple University’s Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, takes undergrads into prisons to study psychology alongside incarcerated students to facilitate communication and social change.

Manke-Miller’s psychology and society course is specifically structured for the incarcerated students, who may lack formal education in scientific principles. It focuses on broad topics related to social interventions, such as methods to improve motivation, relationship satisfaction, and educational outcomes.

Because many students on the inside lack access to academic textbooks, Manke-Miller uses accessible popular psychology texts such as Keith Payne’s The Broken Ladder, which explores inequality. Students submit weekly written reflections and, as a final group project, design policy proposals for stakeholders informed by psychological science. For example, one group presented recommendations to a Pittsburgh school board on how to implement growth mindset interventions to improve student outcomes.

Like other prison education programs, CMU courses have security staff escort instructors to and from class. The first 2 weeks of the course consist of separate meetings with both outside and inside students to discuss expectations, address anxieties, and propose ground rules before the first joint class. In the third week, both groups come together to finalize the rules for classroom interaction. One non-negotiable rule is that students must sever contact after the course concludes to maintain boundaries and safety. To facilitate this, students only use their first names during class.

For Manke-Miller, the interest in prison education strikes a personal chord. A first-generation college student, he grew up in rural Montana and saw how incarceration directly affected the lives of members of his family and community. His mother, whom he described as “maybe the smartest person I’ve ever met,” first became incarcerated in high school, significantly affecting her future.

“It really shaped why I care so much about what happens when people don’t have the same access to opportunities. Meritocracy is a bit of a myth. That is a driver that made me go into social psychology—to explore what about people’s situations encourages, facilitates, and directs their outcomes,” Manke-Miller said.