Despite research indicating that access to higher education by incarcerated individuals reduces recidivism rates, those individuals are still unable to access Pell Grants to fund such education.
This week, the Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP) released the report “Supporting Success: The Higher Education in Prison Key Performance Indicator Framework,” which outlines a comprehensive set of performance indicators to properly identify and benchmark higher education in prison (HEP) programs.
People of color and people from low socioeconomic backgrounds are disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system. Nearly 94% of incarcerated people in prisons throughout the U.S. do not have a postsecondary degree. Existing research shows earning a degree improves their chances upon release of achieving meaningful employment, stable housing and reintegration into communities.
In response to a call for more data to inform discussions, IHEP assembled an advisory council of HEP practitioners and researchers in the field to help inform and develop the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) framework. Incarcerated individuals currently enrolled in HEP programs and former inmates who participated in HEP were interviewed. The work was supported by Ascendium Education Group.
IHEP partnered with University of Iowa’s Liberal Arts Beyond Bars program, Holy Cross College and the University of Notre Dame’s Moreau College Initiative (Indiana) and Raritan Valley Community College (NJ) to examine data collection practices and develop KPIs that would help HEP programs collect and report better data on their impact. Each program has individual characteristics and proven results. Administrators from the three programs served on the advisory council.
“[There is a] national need to identify key performance indicators of student success for higher education in prison programs,” said Dr. Alesha Seroczynski, director of the Moreau College Initiative, who served as principal investigator for this site. “Since I started this position seven years ago, I’ve always been very interested in building a better data set and collecting as much good data as we possibly can.”
Despite a 200-year history of higher education in prisons, incarcerated individuals lost the ability to access Pell Grants with the Violent Crimes Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. In 2015, the Obama administration introduced the Second Chance Pell (SCP) pilot program, using the authority of the U.S. Department of Education Experimental Sites Initiative to allow higher education institutions (selected by application) to enroll incarcerated students using Pell funds.
