Thousands of prisoners get their college degrees behind bars, most of them paid by the federal Pell Grant program, which offers the neediest undergraduates tuition aid that they don’t have to repay.
Prisoner-student Gabriel Bonilla adjusts a cap for Michael Love, center, while waiting for the start of their graduation ceremony at Folsom State Prison in Folsom, Calif., Thursday, May 25, 2023. REPRESA, California — The graduates lined up, brushing off their gowns and adjusting classmates’ tassels and stoles. As the graduation march played, the 85 men appeared to hoots and cheers from their families.
That program is about to expand exponentially next month, giving about 30,000 more students behind bars some $130 million in financial aid per year., begin to address decades of policy during the “tough on crime” 1970s-2000 that brought about mass incarceration and stark racial disparities in the nation’s 1.9 million prison population.
“The last day I talked to him, he was telling me, I should go back to college,” Massey said. “So when I came into prison and I saw an opportunity to go to college, I took it.”It costs about $20,000 to educate a prisoner with a bachelor’s degree program through the Transforming Outcomes Project at Sacramento State, or TOPSS.
That doesn’t mean it’s always popular. Using taxpayer money to give college aid to people who’ve broken the law can be controversial. When the Obama administration offered a limited number of Pell Grants to prisoners through executive action in 2015, some prominent Republicans opposed it, arguing in favor of improving the existing federal job training and re-entry programs instead.
Congress voted to lift the ban in 2020, and since then about 200 Pell-eligible college programs in 48 states, Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico have been running, like the one at Folsom. Now, the floodgates will open, allowing any college that wants to utilize Pell Grant funding to serve incarcerated students to apply and, if approved, launch their program.
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