MARYSVILLE, Ohio – Incarcerated women appeared anxious as they gathered in front of the building where they were to take part in a class on black feminism.
The class of 11 met last month in a room at the Ohio Reformatory for Women (ORW) that was nearly empty except for chairs, with a large table with a computer for an administrator.
“We are all hungry for knowledge,” Amber Swain, one of the inmates, told The Hill.
The course, one of several offered at the prison, will be part of a discussion Monday with a group of Ohio State University professors as the school seeks to expand its prison education degree program following the implementation of Pell Grants for prisoners. last summer.
Mary Thomas, director of the Ohio Prison Education Exchange Project at Ohio State University, told the class that the meeting is as much an opportunity for teachers to learn from them as the other way around.
“The Ohio State University has just received accreditation for a new undergraduate location at the Ohio Reformatory for Women. The degree will be a Bachelor of Arts in women’s, gender and sexuality studies. This summer, OSU will submit an application to the U.S. Department of Education for on-site Pell Grant utilization to begin in the 2025-2026 academic year,” Thomas said. “We are currently exploring funding opportunities to begin the next academic year, so we will be able to begin in the fall 2024 semester.”
Last summer, the Department of Education announced it would again allow Pell Grants for prisoners after they had been barred from receiving money since 1994.
Thomas said each individual educational program must obtain numerous approvals — from the prison system, the school they work with, the state government and ultimately the Department of Education — making the process slow and laborious.
“I know of a program that is awaiting approval from the [Department of Education] for five months,” she told The Hill.
The effort to provide Pell Grants to prisoners began in 2015 under the Obama administration when the Second Chance Pell Experiment began. This program provided federal funding to a limited number of incarcerated people to pursue their education.
Then, in 2020, Congress voted to repeal part of the 1994 Pell grant, allowing access to grants to be greatly expanded. When the FAFSA Simplification Act was passed in 2020, it defined what a prison education program would be and what qualifications a program needed to earn that degree.
The first step for prisoners to receive Pell Grants is for the classes they take to be approved as a federal prison education program (PEP), and applications for this approval opened in July.
But the Department of Education has so far approved only one institution as a PEP: California State Polytechnic University Humboldt’s Bachelor of Science in Communications at Pelican Bay State Prison, though it expects to approve 50 more by 2025.
A department spokesperson said more resources will be available soon to help programs apply for PEP.
“The Department expects to have PEP data as soon as participating schools offering approved programs report information about confined and incarcerated students enrolled in a PEP. The Department expects to be able to report PEP data – at the earliest – in the fall of 2024,” the spokesperson said.
Meanwhile, Ohio State has been offering free courses to ORW women, who had to go through an interview process to be selected due to high demand.
Swain said she also took courses in gender studies, African-American history and creative writing at OSU, emphasizing that the classes “will not only help when I get out” but that they will be useful in prison as she “unlearns social norms.”
ORW students range from women who have been in prison for just a few years to those sentenced to life in prison. This group has read four to five books on black feminism since August.
Arianna Cannon, who is incarcerated for 15 years to life, says that “everything we adapt, we give back to our communities” and that her education “impacts the people we know and have in our lives.”
Studies have shown that educational programs reduce recidivism rates, and Thomas emphasized how even those serving life sentences can affect prison culture and create a more stable environment.
“The expansion of Pell Grants is just beginning to correct some of the damage caused by the near-total elimination of higher education programs in prisons after 1994,” said Marc Howard, professor of government and law at Georgetown University, during a discussion recent. on prison education with the Brookings Institution “For nearly 30 years, incarcerated people have had extremely limited access to college, leaving them almost without the means to pursue higher education. We cannot even begin to measure the negative impact of decades of missed opportunities .”
During the ORW class, Tiyi Morris, a professor of African American studies at OSU, told the women to break into groups to discuss what topics they would present at the workshop with the other school representatives.
As they pulled their chairs into a circle, the women had very different ideas, such as discussing mass incarceration, transphobia, homelessness, climate change and classism, among other topics.
They seemed anxious about having to introduce themselves to teachers, with one inmate gaining general agreement when she exclaimed, “How am I supposed to teach a teacher?”
The women broke into groups again to talk about what “dreaming about freedom” meant to them after reading “Dreams of Freedom: The Black Radical Imagination” by Robin D. Kelly. The dream of freedom is defined by focusing on what a person wants the future to be and the tools they need to make that a reality.
Inmate Danielle Ennis said, “No one has ever asked me that question before,” specifically mentioning the life she wants to see for her daughter.
“I closed my eyes and realized the future of what I can do here and now, but also what I can do in the future,” Ennis said.
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