Angola prison: The entrance to the Louisiana State Penitentiary has a guard house that controls entry into the compound with seop sign, three white buildings and brick sign —the sign says "Louisiana State Penitentiary" and "Burl Cain, Warden"

Q&A: From Louisiana prisoner to Louisiana State University graduate

Within months of his release from a lifetime imprisonment sentence in Louisiana's 18,000-acre prison in Angola, La., Andrew Hundley, then 34, enrolled in junior college and founded the Louisiana Parole Project, a nonprofit focused on advocacy and reentry for former juvenile lifers. Under a 2016 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Hundley, who’d been sentenced in 1997, when he was 15, was released after serving 19 years at Angola. Hundley had the chance to start over, finish college and start a family. But many of the men and women he works with through the Parole Project are older and entered the Louisiana prison system at a time when there were no educational opportunities, especially for lifers. 

White woman with long dark hair sits at a round table, teaching juvenile offenders, whose faces are not fully shown, inside a New Jersey juvenile facility.

At detention facilities offering high school diplomas, college classes are seen as a next step

Four years ago, a social worker from the Middlesex County Juvenile Detention Center asked English professor Alexandra Fields, of nearby Middlesex College, if she would be able to provide college programming for youth incarcerated at that New Jersey facility. Beyond helping them earn their high school diplomas, it offered nothing more  educationally to those graduates. In mid-February 2022, 20 young men across eight of the facilities started working on an associate’s degree from Middlesex, becoming the first such cohort in New Jersey to be on a path toward a college degree.