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If Nearly A Million Incarcerated People Apply For Pell Grants, Are We Ready?

If Nearly A Million Incarcerated People Apply For Pell Grants, Are We Ready?

This is the first in a series of five articles on Pell Grant access for incarcerated students funded by a reporting fellowship from the Education Writers Association. Read the second, third, fourth and fifth in the series.

Almost two years ago, the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) Simplification Act -- the largest revision to the 1965 Higher Education Act in 50 years and part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021 -- was signed into law. It repealed the portion of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 that made incarcerated students ineligible for federal Pell Grants to pay for college programs.

The law is set to take effect, complete with a new set of regulations, in about six months, on July 1, 2023. On that day, a forgotten and maligned subset of low-income higher education students -- namely hundreds of thousands of prisoners -- can become college contenders. They’ll become eligible to apply for these grants again after a 28-year hiatus.

The Numbers of Potential Applicants Are Large



The number of prisoners who will become eligible is probably well over 700,000. According to Dr. Sarah Tahamont, assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Maryland, close to 75 percent of prisoners may be eligible. Dr. Tahamont used a representative sample of Pennsylvania inmates to extrapolate that estimate.

Leaving out the entire population in local jails, because they have fewer higher education offerings (although Pell Grants will continue to be available to students in jails; the Pell grant ban applied to people in state and federal prisons only), there are approximately 1,250,000 prisoners in state and federal prisons -- according to the 2022 “Whole Pie” report from the Prison Policy Initiative, their annual count of prison populations. Seventy-five percent of them amounts to at least 937,500 potential Pell Grant applicants. If Dr. Tahamont is correct that as many as 937,500 inmates will become eligible next summer, that’s a 42-fold increase in applicants that will happen instantly on July 1, 2023.

Pell Grants Address Poverty

Aside from denying them transformative experiences and knowledge, the ban on this need-based form of financial aid focused the discussion of higher education in prison on merit, whether these students forfeited their education through criminal acts or mere criminal allegations. The discussion glossed over what prisoners are and always have been: poor people who couldn’t afford college and were therefore excluded from it.

In 2016, the last date for which data was available, 39 percent of dependent (under age 24) students and 67 percent of independent (over age 24) students lived in or near poverty. These percentages didn’t include any incarcerated students. This particular population has been left out of any analysis of low-income students for decades.

As much as poverty is an outcome of incarceration, it’s also a predictor of it. According to data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ 2016 Survey of Prison Inmates, about 42 percent of state inmates received public assistance before the age of 18. Nineteen percent of them lived in subsidized or public housing and 11 percent experienced homelessness as children. Unsurprisingly, about 62 percent of them never completed high school.

The proscription on Pell Grants for prisoners was just a way to reinforce that poverty, although it’s not clear that the lawmakers who supported the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act in 1994 fully understood that; even the late Rhode Island Senator Claiborne Pell, the namesake of the financial aid for lower-income students, voted yes on the bill that would snatch educational opportunities from prisoners. Senator Pell wouldn’t survive to weigh in on restoring eligibility.

Now that the ban is over, the conversation should shift from what these students don’t deserve to what they can’t afford — and the ways to remedy that deficit.

Pell Grants can be a fix here, but the question of whether the system will be ready for expanded eligibility is unavoidable.

Experimental So Far -- And Focused On Preventing Crime

Since prisoners’ access to Pell Grants has been prohibited since 1994, any recent use of that funding for inmates’ college courses has been an experiment that provided considerable leeway to those who undertook it.Under the Higher Education Act, the U.S. Secretary of Education has the authority to offer experiments according to the Experimental Sites Initiative, sometimes referred to as ESI, which allows the department to test the efficiency of statutory and regulatory flexibility for participating institutions disbursing Title IV student aid.

And that’s precisely what then-Secretary of Education Arne Duncan did. He used the fiat power provided to him by the Higher Education Act to start the pilot Pell Grant program, and invited higher education institutions to apply to participate in it.

Since 2016, the Department of Education has been test-running Pell Grants for prisoners. The Second Chance Experimental Site Initiative, colloquially called the Second Chance Pell Grant program, grew from 63 participant colleges to 130 colleges in 2000 and then to 200 by 2021. According to the Vera Institute of Justice, those 200 schools, which enroll different numbers of students ranging from served 22,117 students through 2020.

The goal of the Second Chance Pell program wasn’t to test how this type of financial aid would be distributed if the program were scaled. it was to determine whether this money should be distributed to incarcerated learners at all.

“The Second Chance Pell Program was designed by the department to evaluate what happens when incarcerated students receive Pell grants and pursue postsecondary education and training with the goal of helping them get jobs, support their families, and turn their lives around.” said Dr. Benedict A. Dorsey, a federal official involved in preparing for the program's launch, at the 2022 Virtual Federal Student Aid Training Conference on December 2, 2022.

“The goal was to enhance public safety by breaking the cycle of recidivism and improving outcomes for people returning from prison, jail and juvenile facilities through grant funding for education programs in prison," Dorsey continued.

Experiment Offered Lessons

While the Pell Grant pilot program chiefly examined whether incarcerated students would benefit from grants, the pilot program didn't fail to provide insight into best practices for implementing full-scale Pell grant access. Advocates and Department of Education officials gleaned important insights into the best ways to implement these grants on an even larger scale, if and when such eligibility was authorized by Congress.

For instance, the earlier requirement that men under age 26 register with the Selective Service limited eligibility and therefore opportunities for male students. So the FAFSA Simplification Act removed this requirement. According to Professor Tahamont,, removing the Selective Service requirement expanded the percentage of students who would be eligible from about four to 15 percent under the Second Chance Pell program eligibility rules.

Education officials also discovered that all potential students had struggled to complete the FAFSA form. It was especially challenging for incarcerated applicants because it asked for information that wasn’t readily available to many inmates, like parents’ tax returns.

The statute reduced the number of questions on the FAFSA overall, removed the question about past convictions for drug-related crimes, and revised the formula used to means-test applicants. A new Student Aid Index (SAI) will replace the Expected Family Contribution (EFC) calculation, a key development for low-to no income prisoners because it eliminates the question of the number of family members in college – usually minimal or unknown for a carceral population – and the allows the SAI – the amount that the student may be expected to pay – to run into negative territory, an accurate representation for people who earn anywhere from $0.14 to $1.41 per hour if their prison jobs pay at all.

In these respects, the revisions will benefit incarcerated applicants alongside everyone else using the form.

But a few changes will help an incarcerated student more than others. The new law made incarceration or parental incarceration an “unusual circumstance” that allows financial aid administrators to grant “dependency overrides” which basically lets applicants escape certain requirements on the application. It used to be that an unanswered question could strip a student of their aid package.

Internet access is not universal in correctional facilities and where it exists, it’s limited. It’s not clear how many students will be allowed to access technology to complete the form online. The Department of Education anticipates that most incarcerated applicants will complete a paper form, which led the agency to develop an entirely separate form for prisoners and a different address to receive them, proving that the committees that oversaw the rules for implementation are attuned to the unusual needs and challenges of people in prisons and jails.

Just The Start

But other lessons that should have stuck didn’t. And other questions have emerged, particularly about the regulations and rules that govern how the law will work and whether they may actually backfire and keep this old form of financial aid that’s been made new again from bringing postsecondary education – and the degrees it will lead to – within indigent prisoners’ reach.

The prison education system, writ large – the educational institutions, the correctional facilities, and sundry administrators – can only be considered ready for “Pell for All” by next summer if it's understood that making incarcerated students eligible is just the first, small step to giving them access to college and the credentials they need to succeed.

Many more steps and considerations require attention before all inmates who want to seek higher education will be able to do so.

Chandra Bozelko did time in a maximum-security facility in Connecticut. While inside she became the first incarcerated person with a regular byline in a publication outside of the facility. Her “Prison Diaries" column ran in The New Haven Independent, and she later established a blog under the same name that earned several professional awards. Her columns now appear regularly in The National Memo.

For Prisoners, The Benefit Of Higher Education Is Both Enormous And Intangible

For Prisoners, The Benefit Of Higher Education Is Both Enormous And Intangible

The college degree is on probation.

Debate over student debt and its forgiveness — whether it will come through or not — has borrowers asking whether their degrees were good deals.

Pundits in different places have prompted these doubts. The New York Times “Your Money” columnist Ron Lieber appeared on the Detroit Today show on Detroit’s National Public Radio station on August 17 and admitted that certain degrees might not be worth it. On the June 4, 2021 episode of his HBO show, Real Time with Bill Maher, Maher’s editorial “New Rule: The College Scam” told audiences “the answer isn’t to make college free, the answer is to make it more unnecessary, which it is for most jobs." Charlie Kirk, founder of the conservative organization Turning Point USA, wrote a whole book on it, arguing that higher ed is a government-backed flim flam.

Even Congress is on the game. While it hardly accuses post-secondary schools of being a racket, the College Transparency Act would require colleges and universities to collect data on student enrollment, transfer, and completion so that applicants and their families know exactly what they’re paying for. Earlier this year, the House of Representatives amended the bill to another one that passed. The Senate version has bipartisan sponsorship.

Much of this data already exists and underwent a tough crunch by a former executive director of College Scorecard, the Department of Education’s online tool that allows prospective students to evaluate the cost and value of education at colleges and universities in the United States.

A fellow at the think tank The Third Way, Michael Itzkowitz culled an entire database from the Scorecard to demonstrate the return on investment of bachelor’s degrees using data from the College Scoreboard. Itzkowitz thinks the best way to measure college education’s value is to look at its Economic Mobility Index, or how it helps low income students to climb out of poverty. He says many schools have low Economic Mobility Indexes that compromise their value.

It may be a coincidence that we’re debating the utility of a college degree right before access to higher education is poised to expand exponentially for people who’ve been specifically excluded from it for more than a quarter of a century. It’s almost as if prisoners’ access to education diluted its value.

On December 21, 2020, Congress lifted the 26 year old ban on federal student aid for prisoners as part of an omnibus spending bill.
In less than one year, all incarcerated individuals across the country will be able to apply for Pell Grants. Experts anticipate a 27-fold increase in the number of eligible students; the Second Chance Pell Experimental Sites initiative, a pilot program instituted by President Barack Obama in 2015 has serviced about 28,119 inmates since 2016.

Congress created the Basic Educational Opportunity or Pell Grant Program in 1972 (they were renamed in 1980 after their champion, the late Rhode Island Senator Claiborne Pell) to pay tuition for students who couldn’t afford it; these grants don’t necessarily need to be repaid. From the start, the program included inmates. Within 10 years of creation, 350 post-secondary education prison programs had developed. Another 10 years later, 800 programs were at work in over 1,300 facilities.

But in 1994, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act blocked inmates from receiving this type of aid and the number of educational programs plummeted to eight in three years. That drastic reduction in offerings was bad news for everyone; the RAND Corporation conducted the seminal study on the effect of post-secondary schooling and found that higher education lowered recidivism rates by 43 percent. Without those programs, recidivism rates didn’t decrease as prison populations ballooned 500 percent.

Before the value of higher education behind bars undergoes similar scrutiny, we should know why prison education reduces recidivism so effectively. And it has little to do with post-prison employment prospects and the American obsession with credentialism.

Higher education improves the chances of employment but not as much as it should. Some college-educated prisoners still struggle to secure employment. Often the collateral consequences of a criminal conviction effectively offset any advantage that college education provides.

Education works to keep people on the straight and narrow because it changes prisoners' identities, not in the sense of identity politics, but in the sense of understanding themselves as someone other than society’s definition of them. Enrollment in a college course turns shoplifters and solicitors into scholars and students. It’s a new descriptor that doesn’t invite shame.

The late sociologist Jack Mezirow developed a theory of transformative learning and said adult education amounts to “becoming aware that one is caught in one’s own history and is reliving it.” There’s probably no more apt way to describe rehabilitation.

A dearth of research and evidence on the transformative power of higher education in prison persists in the United States, but scholars in the United Kingdom have caught onto the reasons why prison education is effective and found that it’s the shift in self-perception that reduces reoffending.

Twenty-five years ago, Anne Marie Reuss, a prison educator, wrote her doctoral dissertation at the University of Leeds. Reuss divided inmates’ lives into periods of pre-institutional identity and institutional identity. The institutional identity will develop, Reuss wrote, sometimes as a survival mechanism. Higher education in prison can intervene in that process and assure that institutional identities aren’t more anti-social than the identities inmates rode in on.

Other researchers found similar changes. Even a distance learning course, one with no formal classroom education, helped inmates in England and Wales become “part of a wider community of learners which helped them to replace their prisoner identity.”

Just because researchers in the United States don’t concentrate on the shift in self-perception among incarcerated students doesn’t mean it’s not understood. Daniel Karpowitz, an assistant commissioner in the state of Minnesota’s Department of Correction and former director of national programs for the Bard Prison Initiative, wrote in College in Prison: Reading in an Age of Mass Incarceration:

“Every student is also an “inmate”, “offender” or “prisoner” in their own eyes or in the eyes of those surrounding them. In no small part, the struggles around these contested and competing identities define the milieu of the college in prison.”

Most of the research on education and identity is ethnographic because it’s hard to assess these shifts quantitatively. That’s probably why advocates for the restoration of Pell Grant eligibility concentrated so much on recidivism; it demonstrates improvement in measurable ways and with benefits that accrue to society, not only to the students themselves.

A college degree does pay financial dividends. Someone who has graduated college will earn about $1 million more in a lifetime than someone who did not.

But focusing narrowly on education's return on investment, particularly for prisoners, eclipses its ability to reframe their lives for them and society. Even with over 700,000 inmates eligible for Pell Grants next year, prison education might not be able to prove itself; its value can’t be fully gauged -- at least not in ways we are ready to understand.

Chandra Bozelko did time in a maximum-security facility in Connecticut. While inside she became the first incarcerated person with a regular byline in a publication outside of the facility. Her “Prison Diaries" column ran in The New Haven Independent, and she later established a blog under the same name that earned several professional awards. Her columns now appear regularly in The National Memo.