This Critical Discourse Analysis looks at the perspectives and experiences of academic advisors regarding incarceration to determine how discourses might impact college access for this emerging student population. Key implications of this work demonstrate that (a) academic advisors are not aware of how to best support students with incarceration…

Now that federal Pell Grant funding has been reinstated for learners who are incarcerated, the field is in flux. Higher education in prison programs and their home institutions, departments of correction, and accreditation and oversight bodies are all adapting and developing their practices to meet new policy and regulation needs. Two major facets…

This article presents a synthesized historiography of higher education in American prisons, exploring interactions of federal, state, and institution-level policies within six specific states: California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Mississippi, New York, and Texas. We define considerations for researchers, policymakers, and advocates regarding…

The growing evidence of the myriad benefits of prison education programs helps to explain why Congress took historic, bipartisan legislative action to reverse a ban on Pell Grants for incarcerated learners. Effective July 1, 2023, eligible incarcerated people can access federal Pell Grant funding for the first time in almost 30 years. The New…

Federal second chance Pell grants were recently made widely available to incarcerated students in the United States to fund undergraduate education. Piedmont Virginia Community College was a pilot site for this expansion and began full scale implementation of transfer-oriented associate degrees at three correctional centers in its service area.…

In 2023, Federal Pell Grant funding was reinstated for learners who are incarcerated, and new regulations were released to govern the eligibility of higher education in prison programs for such funding. This has driven increased interest in higher education in prison programming, as programs look to help their students access Pell grants and…

Pell eligibility for incarcerated people is a great rehabilitative opportunity, but several challenges remain. This article recaps five of the issues identified by the original research articles in this special issue. It also considers how solutions proposed in these studies may be beneficial across a variety of these issues and gathers…

People who are impacted by the criminal justice system ("system-impacted") face barriers when seeking financial aid to pay for college. Between the late 1960s and the early 2000s, Congress created laws that prohibited incarcerated students and students with certain criminal convictions from receiving federal grants and loans. This paper…

There is currently bipartisan support for criminal justice reform in the United States. One reform, recently passed through the Consolidated Appropriations Act/COVID relief package (December 2020), restored need-based, higher educational aid for incarcerated persons. With a resurgence of college-in-prison programs on the horizon, this article…

This research considers Pell grant restoration for incarcerated people for the field of higher education in prison. Using the original data, we outline the limits of Pell funding in the prison context by surfacing persistent funding challenges that the Pell grant alone cannot address and may exacerbate. By providing the necessary investments to…

The United States has gone through two transformations in the meaning of higher education in prison and the value of access for people in prison in the last 50 years and is now moving towards a third. The establishment of Pell grants in 1972 allowed for widespread access to higher education in prison, while the removal of those grants in 1994…

This article synthesizes literatures relating to the fields of andragogy and prison education. It is a key moment to reflect on teaching practices inside carceral settings. As Pell Grant availability for incarcerated students is set to expand dramatically, many college and university faculty are soon likely to be entering prisons as instructors…

The violence of incarceration creates greater responsibility for higher education administrators in supporting students who are in prison. Using focus group data with incarcerated students and formerly incarcerated alumni who participated in or are actively participating in Second Chance Pell, we explore their perceptions and understandings of the…

Routine practices in federal and state penal facilities deny undocumented individuals access to various programming, including sentence-mandated and education programs. Many prison higher education programs also exclude individuals who are not US citizens and because undocumented people cannot access Pell Grant funds, it is unlikely they will…

The landscape of higher education in prison programming is in the midst of a sea change. After eight years of the Second Chance Pell experiment, federal Pell grant funding for students who are incarcerated was fully reinstated on July 1, 2023. While Pell reinstatement will likely increase educational access for students who are incarcerated, it…