UW’s prison educative education initiative, Wyoming Pathways from Prison, has been selected as one of 73 higher education institutions to receive the U.S. Department of Education’s Second Chance Pell Grant Program.
“This is an amazing opportunity for UW to really take a whole other step in our ability to reach the most vulnerable and marginalized populations in Wyoming and to serve our state in a whole new way that we haven’t been able to do before.” Co-Executive Director of Wyoming Pathways from Prison Rob Colter said.
“I think that’s just an amazing opportunity and I’m really proud and excited to be part of it.”
The objectives of Wyoming Pathways from Prison, according to their website, are to provide no-cost college credit, in partnership with Wyoming community colleges, to incarcerated people, engage in valuable service to the state of Wyoming, mentor UW students in teaching and leadership, and provide students with valuable real-world experience through teaching and assistance to the Department of Corrections.
Colter mentioned how the pell grant will support Pathways from Prison.
“We’re now in a position where I think we can offer full four-year degrees. Now, not a full slate of majors and it’s also going to, to some extent, be dependent on the faculty. But with this plan, we can now pay faculty to do it as opposed to just cover costs,” Colter said.
“We’re also looking at how we might pay for things like books and supplies that the students might need. Incarcerated students are very rarely in a position to spend much money. And if they do, it has to come pretty much from family outside. And they’re often not in a position to buy a $200 math textbook or something.”
The COVID-19 pandemic also pushed Pathways from Prison and the Department of Corrections to develop and improve their online platforms.
“COVID has taught us there’s some things that we can do online that we weren’t sure we could do. One of the things Pathways from Prison has done over the past few years is helped the Department of Corrections improve the technology they have available to do distance education,” Colter said.
“So the prisons themselves are better able to do distance education. So that’s, that’s gonna help us do a lot in what’s available and help get other people involved.”
Typically, Pathways from Prison offers a slate of trans-disciplinary courses, such as financial literacy, parenting, and stoicism, but these are dependent on the funding and the faculty at the time.
“In the past, we’ve taught courses basically that were a function of what we had the funding and the time,” Colter said. “They were all sort of designed to be things that would maybe be particularly attractive to incarcerated students, and a lot of them were designed to be done in ways that allowed for the participation of students here on campus.”
“It was never enough that we could even feasibly talk about offering enough credits to get a degree of any kind and associate’s degree or anything. Now the plan is to be able to offer them [incarcerated students] a Bachelor of General Studies degree, which is something that’s also fairly new to us [UW], Within about four years, four calendar years. So that’ll be three to four classes a year.”
Colter also described how prison education programs remarkably decrease re-incarceration rates.
“Incarcerated people who take any form of higher education, by which I mean anything above the high school level, just by participating in higher education, and that doesn’t even mean completing classes or a certain number of classes, just by participating, that’s associated with a reduction in recidivism rates,” Colter said.
“The reduction is nearly half, just by them participating at all and if they actually get the chance to complete a degree, an associate’s degree it drops by quite a bit more than that. If they complete a bachelor’s degree, all of a sudden the recidivism rate for people who complete a bachelor’s degree while incarcerated is about 7%. That compares to 70 to 80% of the general population.
Studies have also shown that decreases in recidivism also save money for the community as a whole.
“Which also ends up saving taxpayers a ton of money because we aren’t putting people back in prison. Most of the studies are suggesting that for every dollar we spend on higher education in prison, we end up saving $4 to $5 on recidivism costs. And that’s a remarkable bang for the buck.”
“Education comes from the Latin term to lead someone out, right. It’s the leading of people out and I think that metaphor really applies in this case. It’s our best, most effective, and most cost-effective way of helping these people out.
