At the close of almost 25 years of winding through New York state's prisons, former Black Panther Eddie Ellis walked away in 1994 with four college degrees he earned while incarcerated and kept treading his singular path as an activist on the issues of police, courts, crime and punishment. He then established the Center for NuLeadership on Urban…

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…

The first Innocence Project (IP) was founded in 1992 by attorneys Barry C. Scheck and Peter J. Neufeld at Yeshiva University's Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. The original goal was to free people whose innocence could be proven using DNA. So far, IPs have helped free nearly 300 men and women who had served an average of 13 years for crimes they…

There are estimated 1.5 million Black men in prison and another 3.5 million on probation. Black males make up more than 70 percent of the total prison population, even though they make up only 6 percent of the U.S. Population. The alarming incarceration rates of Black men is not a new phenomenon, but one that has reverberated in news headlines and…

Increasingly, dropping out of high school is a one-way ticket to prison for Black men. Recent research conducted by sociologists Becky Pettit and Bruce Western indicates that 3 percent of Whites and 20 percent of Blacks born between 1965 and 1969 had served time in prison by their early thirties. The crisis among Black and Hispanic men mobilized…