second chance pell Archives - Juvenile Justice Information ExchangeJuvenile Justice Information Exchange

Prison college: Man burred in background wears college graduation gown holding rolled up white paper tied with red ribbon towards camera

As Second Chance Pell Grant program grows, more incarcerated people can get degrees – but there’s a difference between prison-run and college-run education behind bars

By Mneesha Gellman | April 26, 2023

An expansion in access to federal financial aid through Pell Grants for those who are incarcerated will soon make higher education a bit more available to them. As of 2014, only 15% of people earn a college degree or postsecondary certificate either before or during their incarceration.

prisoners want more college prison programs: young black prisoner in orange garb looking at something

Opinion: Education-minded prisoners thirst for more college prison programs

By Khalil A. Scott | June 2, 2022

For a chance to earn a college degree while he’s incarcerated, Quantae has traded the matching color scheme and single-person cells of Lee’s young adult unit for concrete-gray quarters the size of a small bathroom that he now shares with another man at Ridgeland Correctional Institution. There he’s been able to enroll at Clafin University, the only college in our state currently using federal Pell Grants for prison education. He had to leave behind the supportive community he’d been a part of at Lee.

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

By Charlotte West | March 8, 2022

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.