Goals & Achievements of the College-in-Prison Reentry Initiative
Across New York State, the College-in-Prison (CIP) Reentry Initiative has helped state correctional facilities expand access to higher education within their prisons, serving hundreds of incarcerated students from 2017 to 2021. Through the Criminal Justice Investment Initiative (CJII), researchers assessed the goals and achievements of the program, including creating infrastructure and academic reentry supports for students.
New York State has gradually scaled up its college-in-prison programming with support from private foundations and public investments in recent years, including the College-in-Prison Reentry Initiative (CIP), a $7.3 million partnership established in 2017 between Governor Andrew Cuomo, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS), and the CUNY Institute for State & Local Governance (ISLG). Through the CIP Initiative, seven colleges and universities have been funded to deliver college programming across 17 prisons[1] in New York State and have served 748 students to date from fall 2017 through spring 2021, helping increase overall program capacity by approximately 50% compared to the year before CIP began. Currently, 30 New York State prisons offer some form of in-person college programming.
The CIP Initiative filled a void that was the culmination of decades of Federal and State policy. The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, emerging from the 1980s and 90s “tough-on-crime” era, set into motion a 26-year ban that prohibited incarcerated people from receiving federal financial aid to take college classes in prison. Because so many programs relied on a combination of Pell Grants and state financial support, this dramatic reduction in funding led to an immediate drop in the number of prison systems offering these programs. Nationwide, the number of incarcerated students receiving postsecondary education fell from around 38,000 to 21,000.
As detailed in this brief, the achievements of the College-in-Prison Initiative can serve as a model for college-in-prison across New York State.
CIP has significantly expanded access to postsecondary programs across New York State, with many colleges and universities serving students at volumes near, or even exceeding, their targets. To date, thanks to CIP, as well as to Second Chance Pell and private philanthropy, there are now 15 degree programs across more than 30 institutes of higher education operating across 30 state prisons.
The Initiative has also created the necessary coordination and infrastructure, through curriculum alignment and developing articulation and transfer agreements, to facilitate greater continuity of learning such that more students can successfully finish their degrees if they are transferred and/or after release.
The CIP Initiative has also led to more robust academic reentry supports by working with providers to create individualized academic reentry plans that support continuation of academic programs.
Finally, the CIP Initiative has created a learning community for providers to exchange information and best practices. Ultimately, CIP enhances the landscape of education programs across prisons in New York State and establishes a blueprint for scaling programming effectively.
With the state poised to reinstate the Tuition Assistance Program (TAP) for incarcerated students and the forthcoming of reinstatement of Pell Grants along with the support of the New York Consortium of Higher Education in Prison (NYCHEP), the State has the opportunity to provide high quality, postsecondary education across the entire DOCCS system in a more coordinated, comprehensive way. In particular, this expansion would support new programming in currently under-resourced parts of the state including Northern and Western New York State, where most DOCCS facilities are located. In turn, additional funding would be needed to support reentry providers in these areas as well. Indeed, college-in-prison is approaching a watershed moment and may soon be able to deliver on the promise of making high quality, postsecondary education accessible for the first time in many of these students’ lives, rectifying a decades-long disparity in educational access while contributing to more successful reentry and safer communities for all New Yorkers.
For more on the Goals & Achievements of the College-In-Prison Reentry Initiative, see this brief.
[1] Watertown Correctional Facility was closed in March 2021. CIP Programming continues at the remaining 16 facilities.