Prison Pell grants offer second chance for inmates reclaiming their lives

To get a sense of the impact a program like the University of Puget Sound’s Freedom Education Project can have on offenders in Washington prisons trying to reclaim their lives, sitting in on the program’s graduation ceremony is a good start.

I was fortunate enough to do just that last month, and the overwhelming feelings of hope and accomplishment are still with me. The ceremony was powerful, and the sense of redemption palpable.

But to get a clearer sense of what it means for offenders like the women at the Washington Corrections Center for Women in Purdy to have the opportunity to earn a college degree while behind bars, talking to them about the difference it will make in their lives is even more revealing.

“It gives us a credibility we wouldn’t have with the outside world,” said Tonya Wilson, a 41-year-old Tacoma woman serving her sentence and working toward an associate degree of arts and sciences. The courses are offered at the prison by the nonprofit Freedom Education Project and accredited through Tacoma Community College.

“When we leave here, it’s like we have a bank account with society that we didn’t have before,” she continued.

Like me, Wilson was in the crowd watching last month’s graduation ceremony. But soon, she said with determination, she would be one of the women in gowns receiving a degree.

And thanks to a recent decision by the Obama administration — which has chosen three Washington community colleges, including TCC, as part of a national movement to begin offering federal Pell grants to incarcerated offenders — when Wilson earns that degree, she won’t become one of just a handful of offenders to have had the opportunity to do so.

As Katherine Long of The Seattle Times recently reported, 67 colleges and universities across the country were chose to participate in the new program — deemed Second Chance Pell.

In Washington, the new federal money will pay for 60 inmates at the Washington Corrections Center for Women and the Mission Creek Corrections Center in Belfair to take associate degree classes through TCC, in partnership with the Freedom Education Project.

In addition, the money will help 63 male offenders at Monroe Correctional Institution and 12 men at Cedar Creek Corrections Center take community college courses toward an associate degree.

The Pell funding will also allow people incarcerated in prisons that lack higher-education programs to enroll in distance-learning courses, as long as they are eligible, according to Freedom Education Project Development and Communications Director Kailin Mooney.

Unfortunately, eligibility might still need ironing out, as there’s a chance that only offenders scheduled to be released in the next five years will be allowed to participate.

Still, baby steps.

“It will definitely allow us to serve more students,” said Mooney.

Currently, nearly 140 women are enrolled in Freedom Education Project classes at the Washington Corrections Center for Women, and this September a pilot project will be launched at Mission Creek.

By 2020, the Freedom Education Project hopes 50 percent of the women in Washington prisons will be enrolled in college.

The Obama administration’s decision represents a marked — and much needed — departure in the way rehabilitation is viewed in the world of criminal justice. As Mooney points out, it’s part of a growing national narrative about what it means to rehabilitate rather than just incarcerate.

Federal Pell grant funding was prohibited from being used by prison college programs in the 1990s, the byproduct of a political debate over whether taxpayer money should be used to fund such niceties for convicted criminals.

Washington made a similar move around the same time, prohibiting the use of state money in prisons for anything but vocational programs.

Hopefully, we’re beginning to see the error of our ways — and the rehabilitative power of education in prison.

“In prison, there are a lot of programs that are vocational,” said Tanya Erzen, executive director of the program and an associate professor of religion at UPS. “I think that’s all really good, but what a college degree says is we believe you are capable of figuring out what you want to do.

“The point is that we’re not pigeonholing people into being one thing. … I think college says you can transform yourself and be a much broader person.”

Tod Treat, the executive vice president for academic and student affairs at TCC, shares that sentiment. He said TCC is “humbled” to be one of the colleges chosen to participate in the federal pilot program, and “absolutely delighted to … have an opportunity to continue to help incarcerated women identify mechanisms that will be helpful for them on the outside.”

“We, like most community colleges, are the colleges of second chances, if you want to think of it that way,” he continued. “This is very consistent with our mission.”

As a society, it should be our mission as well.

This story was originally published July 4, 2016 at 2:00 PM with the headline "Prison Pell grants offer second chance for inmates reclaiming their lives."