This Family Engagement Toolkit is designed for facility and school administrators. It provides tools that can be adapted to promote family involvement in a facility school. The tools are intended to be used by program staff to help encourage families--including those who are reluctant, have been affected by trauma, or are unsure of how to become…

The positive behavioral interventions and supports (PBIS) framework has been applied for over two decades in public schools throughout the country. More recently it has been adopted, or is being considered for adoption, by an increasing number of states and facilities providing residential or secure care for juvenile offenders. During…

This study evaluates cross-sectional data from 9 years of the "INTUIT: Work and Careers" intervention (N = 491), a program for female offenders in reentry. Of several measures used, participants showed increases on the five career decision-making self-efficacy factors assessed by the "Career Decision Making Self-Efficacy Short Form…

In 2017, a mathematics education intervention in the Doña Ana County Detention Center, Las Cruces, New Mexico, was begun by two retired professors of mathematics as a volunteer project. The program now provides internship and master's thesis opportunities for students in the Department of Criminal Justice at New Mexico State University. 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 present study addresses the complexities of providing education and rehabilitation to incarcerated youth during the COVID-19 crisis. A total of three state-level administrators, one supervisor for juvenile residential services health care, and one medical director of state detention centers from three states completed a survey focusing on the…

This article examines the relationship between internalizing dimensions of emotional and behavioral disorders such as depression and anxiety with unresolved trauma and abuse among incarcerated girls in Mexico and the United States. The goal is to arrive at a better understanding of (a) how mental health conditions may contribute to deviant…

Black men within the United States with learning disabilities have difficulty navigating the collegiate environment (Jackson, 2016) because they are not academically prepared when taking developmental courses (Abreu et al., 2016; Bouck & Joshi, 2017). Researchers have studied Black men's lived experiences with Individualized Education Plans…

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…

In Fall of 2022, Ithaka S+R launched a first-of-its-kind national survey on technology access in higher education in prison programs. The survey asked respondents about student access to technology in their Higher Education in Prison (HEP) program, focusing on four thematic areas: technological devices, learning management systems and software,…

Black students experience out-of-school suspensions at a higher rate than other students. The higher rate at which these students are suspended is believed to contribute to a school-to-prison pipeline. This review article is designed to enhance the understanding of this problem by focusing on the factors that play a part in the school-to-prison…

Rising rates of incarceration in the United States and continuing use of the death penalty in over half of the states in the United States signal a need for more involvement of social workers in forensic roles to mitigate unjust sentencing. The National Association of Social Workers has consistently maintained a professional policy stance in…

The prison population is a growing problem in the United States, as the number of incarcerated individuals surpass those in larger countries. The sequence of students being pushed out of the classroom and into the prison system has been termed the preschool-to-prison pipeline (Mallett, 2016). While exploring possible strategies to help mitigate…

Scholars and policymakers alike have recognized mass incarceration and criminal recidivism as two of the most profound challenges American society faces. For more than half a century, the United States has been the world's most prominent incarcerator, boasting the highest incarceration rate and the third-highest recidivism rate, with analysts…

Motivating adolescents to read can be a challenge, but motivating incarcerated adolescents to read may be even more of a challenge. Developing readers in residential facilities are often overlooked by traditional classroom teachers, but much can be learned from incarcerated youth and their motivation and engagement. Unfortunately, there is a…