Locked out

Overview & Synopsis

As a collaborative program bringing the instructional resources of Wesleyan University to the maximum security Cheshire Correctional Institute in Connecticut enters its second semester, prison and higher education experts are seeing decreasing support for similar programs across the U.S. According to some experts, state funding on prison education programs is generally less today and it has become a national trend. Karen Humphrey, the executive director of the California Postsecondary Education Commission, states that prison education programs in California have greatly been victim to a larger corrections cost-cutting effort. In the face of such trends, the Wesleyan Center for Prison Education received a near $300,000 grant from the Bard Prison Initiative--a Bard College-sponsored program to provide liberal arts courses and degrees to inmates in five New York state prisons--which reports an about 45 percent recidivism drop in the U.S. among inmates who have participated in prison education offerings over the last 20-plus years.