Deborah Meehan, director of the University of Maine at Augusta Rockland Center, recalls watching a “brilliant” student graduate from her prison education program present on his work. “Everyone in the room was in tears,” she said. He went on to work as a teaching assistant for a college course for incarcerated students on individual character and moral development in prison.
He’s serving a life sentence. And “his sentence isn’t going to change,” Meehan said. But his environment “will forever be changed” because of him.
Her student is one of many. There are more people sentenced to prison for life than the entire prison population in the early 1970s, according to a 2018 report by the Sentencing Project. That’s one in seven prisoners, over 206,000 people, including life sentences without the possibility of parole, life sentences with the possibility of parole and “virtual” life sentences of at least 50 years.
And yet this sprawling population is often left out of conversations about prison education – and sometimes barred from programs themselves – because of an emphasis on preparing students for release and employment.
“That’s where all the data is,” said Meehan. “That’s where all the dialogue is. We collectively as a society, we’re still responsible for the incarcerated populations we’ve put behind bars. So, how can we make that an experience for them that still has potential and human dignity? I know some may see it as a wasted investment. I don’t believe in that at all.”
As colleges and universities prepare to create and expand prison education programs, in response to the restoration of the Pell Grant for incarcerated students, she wants lifers to be included in the federal funding, unlike the Second Chance Pell program, a pilot program started under President Barack Obama, where students had to be eligible for release.
Part of the issue is prison education policy discussions also heavily revolve around recidivism, which is 48% less likely for people involved in prison college programs, according to a 2016 Vera Institute of Justice report. While that’s important – and an easy figure to cite when calling for resources – it can also leave lifers out of the picture when measuring a program’s value, said Jessica Jensen, director of statewide educational initiatives at John Jay College of Criminal Justice’s Institute for Justice and Opportunity.
