Eight prisoners at the California Rehabilitation Center in Norco are on the pathway to higher education and opportunities after their release.
They’re in a new bachelor’s degree program for inmates launched in December by Pitzer College, one of the five Claremont Colleges. It’s the nation’s first in-prison bachelor’s program built on the Inside-Out curriculum that allows inmates to attend classes with students from outside the prison, college officials said.
At the virtual launch ceremony, the students, who live together in the medium-security prison’s college dorm, received their Pitzer College acceptance letters.
“A Bachelor’s degree will afford me the opportunity to leave prison with a different identity to that of being an ex-convict,” Freddy Cisneros, 40, wrote in a letter. “Some of us truly desire to be rehabilitated and to succeed in life. Prisons (must) include higher education to people who are incarcerated, or they will only continue to pump out people who are stuck in a criminal lifestyle and mentality: an ever-revolving door of imprisonment.”
He hopes to one day get a Ph.D. in computer science and run his own artificial intelligence software company.
Seven students, including Cisneros, were also graduates of Norco College’s Prison Partnership Program, which has awarded over 45 inmates with associate’s degrees since 2017.
All eight will be the first in their families to earn a bachelor’s degree and are part of the Claremont Colleges’ Justice Education Initiative. The programs are funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Foundation and other grants — allowing inmates to take classes tuition-free.
“There was a completely new universe of knowledge out there just waiting for me to find it,” said inmate Damien Busby, who has already earned six associate’s degrees. “For me, a bachelor’s degree is one of the steps I must climb to reach my goal of earning a Ph.D. It provides an advantage to me in a world that will discriminate against me every chance it gets. Receiving my official acceptance letter was one of the greatest moments of my life, right up there with the births of my children.”
There are nearly 4,500 prisoners enrolled in face-to-face associate’s degree programs statewide, reports the non-profit Corrections to College California. Since 2014, all 35 California state prisons have worked with community colleges to bring associate’s degree classes to inmates.
Correctional education reduces an inmate’s chance of returning to prison by 43%, according to a 2013 report by the RAND Corporation and the U.S. Department of Justice. Recidivism drops further to 13.7% for those who earn associate’s degrees while incarcerated, and down to 5.6% for those who earn their bachelor’s degrees.
Those taking part in prison education are 13% more likely to get a job after release, the study found.
California prisoners who also finish courses or earn degrees can also knock time off their sentences, part of the state’s policy for issuing time-off credits for inmates who finish rehabilitative and educational programs.
Professor Nigel Boyle, director of Pitzer College’s Institute for Global-Local Action and Study that developed the Inside-Out program, said that “disproportionate” numbers of Black, Native American and Latinos being incarcerated is “one reason they are not represented well at colleges and universities.”
It’s the duty of higher education institutions to do something about it, Boyle said.
“These guys are not just taking classes to get out,” Boye said. “They are really developing as individuals, and it’s clear, the way they talk about learning and pedagogy, that they are being impacted intellectually.”
The inmates — who went through the same application process as prospective Pitzer students — are working toward bachelor’s degrees in organizational studies, an interdisciplinary course focused on how systems work. They’re set to graduate by the end of this year.
Normally, faculty and students would meet inside the prison for three hours, once a week, but classes moved online during the coronavirus pandemic.
Milly Chi, a Pitzer junior, remembers an eye-opening conversation with inmates about the Lori Loughlin college admissions scandal in 2019. Chi said the discussions challenged her to look closely at social justice and privilege within the education system.
Chi, 20, says the classroom is not competitive, but “comes alive with exchanged ideas and personal experiences that reaffirm our relationality to one another. We learn how we are all sort of interconnected in these unequal systems, but we can learn together and build mutual understanding.”
Other California universities have launched similar bachelor’s programs for those behind bars, including Cal State Los Angeles’ Prison Graduation Initiative, which leads to a bachelor’s degree in communications studies, and a new sociology degree partnership between UC Irvine and the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
“Being incarcerated can be demeaning and disheartening, but higher education has given me a sense of direction and a sense of purpose,” inmate Yusef Pierce wrote in a letter. “Quality education should be a human right for everyone, and not just a privilege.”
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