ReEntry and Education, Part 2
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ReEntry and Education, Part 2
Building an external network
I worked as a Reentry Education Navigator for several years, as part of the Washington state navigtor program. That project, which placed navigators inside of all the state-run Depts of Corrections (DOC) facilities, and campus-based navigators on several community college campuses, began in 2016. It has faced numerous challenges, but is still in place and has grown to serve more campuses and students. I held my position from 2017-2021, and those four years were a deep dive into the world of college systems, reentry, the mind-boggling technicalities of careral institutions, and how none of these things work well together.
In 2019, I co-presented at a regional NASPA conference with my colleagues Aaron (WA campus navigator), Joe (Project Rebound), and Emily (WA corrections navigator). As part of that presentation, I created two illustrations identifying relationships, both internal and external, necessary to create a pathway to campus for reentering students.
One of the reasons colleges – especially community colleges – are excellent partners in any reentry effort is because so many 1) already serve people returning to the community AND their families and 2) they often already have infrastructure in place to respond to some level of students’ basic needs. This is not to say ALL community colleges do this well, or even make a serious effort, but many are doing outstanding work in supporting students in and outside of the classroom.
Community colleges have been carrying this work for decades, in part because they are the front line of workforce development and the entry point for people with little historical access to education. Adult Basic Ed (ABE), the (for profit) GED ©, and other programs like High School Plus, are community college staples. If they are state-mandated in facilities, they are often provided by the community college. If education is offered post-GED, courses in business or college prep (for example) are extremely common offerings. Beyond that, what is available is highly dependent on what is offered by each college, interest and space available at the prison, and instructors who can/will teach inside.
Vocational and trades programs are desirable to prisons because they hold the promise of well-paying jobs post-incarceration, and community colleges have long been the caretakers of these programs. Next to community colleges, organizations like the HomeBuilders Association (and other trade associations) may offer short-term ‘pre-apprenticeship’ style courses, although it can take a long time for them to get access due to space and materials requirements. Local union halls may get an apprenticeship program up and running, but my sense is that it is not as common as a community college/union partnership.
It is harder for me to speak directly to four year colleges, but they have traditionally served a different student population and have different priorities. As I mentioned in my previous post, the return of Pell funding to incarcerated students has generated a flurry of activity around creating prison education programs, especially in four year universities. There is no question that incarcerated scholars have a deep desire for educational opportunities offered by four year institutions, especially higher level degrees and their challenge of increasing levels of rigorous thought. There is also no question that there are faculty and staff with a deep desire to create access to this type of learning for incarcerated scholars.
But desire alone is not enough to support students during and after incarceration. It is unethical and unkind to invite students, any students, to your campus with no forethought for the boundaries they will encounter, and real efforts to remove those boundaries. This lack of understanding and care doesn’t only set students up for failure, it actively harms them and then tells them that the “failure” is their fault. This lack of care is cruel, confusing, and the opposite of what education should aspire to offer and be. It is the responsibility of the people now creating and funding and implementing these programs to think through these intricacies, and begin looking for solutions.
The effort to create pathways to college for students who transition from inside to outside, or people who want to go to school post-prison, is still very new. While the programs I mentioned earlier in the article are robust, they are also reliant on and shaped by the support of their specific colleges, and resources available in their local communities. It is hard to write about such programs without endless qualifiers and lots of “this and that will depend on your college/community” which is partly why there is so little information.
On to external relationships -
The success of your program will depend on the relationships you cultivate and nurture internally and externally, but it is a Herculean task to figure out such an invisible and sprawling web of connections. I spent much of my time trying to do exactly that, and while every college and community will have a unique blend of resources and access points, you need to be able to identify them. You may also have needs and resources I haven’t identified, so consider this a jump off point.
(for people with screen readers, here are the Questions for Getting Started from the image)
Questions for Getting Started
What formalized relationships already exist?
What informal relationships exist?
Who are the key stakeholders in those relationships?
Where does that college side of that relationship live?
Which systems do you think would be the most receptive to a new relationship?
How would you begin that conversation?
This diagram places the college between carceral and community systems because that is a role colleges could play, if they so choose. Systemically, education has a better chance of gaining access to incarcerated people on a more consistent and long-term basis than small community organizations. Small organizations can often gain access as volunteers, but that access is fragile, at best. The non-educational organizations that (loosely) I know of with the most durable relationships with jails and prisons are faith-based recovery groups (AA, NA, etc) and religous practitioners.
There is a broad range of other groups that get more variable access and they include personal development/life skills, writing and book groups, gardening, beekeeping, various arts & crafts, theater, yoga & a few other types of movement, meditation, nonviolent communication, short-term trades training, and possibly a bunch more I don’t know about that are less common. It is rare that any of these groups maintain a sustained, systemic presence (i.e. contracted services, non-volunteer, have some range of movement and presence in the facility, and are part of daily activities and routine).
Some branches of the Community Systems may have their own connections to carceral facilities. County and state government, public health (state and county), child and family support, and (of course), the criminal legal system. It is worth exploring whether the college already has relationships with any of these, and whether those existing connections might provide insight into how best to build a relationship with the carceral facility. If you cannot gain direct access to the facility, these community relationships will be a primary point of contact for the students you want to serve. Building strong community partnerships, and letting those partners know exactly how you have prepared your campus to support and care for reentering people is key to creating a pathway to campus.
If you are not sure what services your campus already offers students, make the effort to find out. The workforce development or career center, multicultural programs, programs for women & gender studies, and LGBTQIA people, veterans, first generation and rural students – people working in these types of population-specific spaces are often the best resources to find out what the college offers, and what kinds of partnerships with the community already exist.
At this point, further explanation will devolve into a lot of “depends on what is available in your area” and “depends on what your college can/can’t or will/won’t do” so I’m going to end here. My hope is that if you are considering actively recruiting and serving reentering students on your campus, do your homework and preparation up front.
Learn who your external partners are, how you’re connected to them, and how you can support them in return. Learn where students run into issues and how you can help, who you can go to for help. You don’t have to do this alone, and it is to your students’ benefit for you to have a strong, wide network of relationships they can rely on also.
There are groups of impacted people and scholars who are working tirelessly in this field, educating colleges about the needs of returning students and their families – check them out:
Project Rebound (I linked to Cal State, but there are programs on several campuses), Formerly Incarcerated Graduates Network, Alliance for Higher Ed in Prison (its 2023 conference is coming up!), and Rising Scholars (operating mainly in CA prisons). The Rise Up conference spotlights the voices of formerly incarcerated people in discussing life post-incarceration and is happening Sept 6-8 2023. There are likely more – especially small consultancies and solo entrepreneurs that I don’t know so if you are one of these, please let me know so I can give you a shout out.
There are also resources provided by systems actors, which can be helpful in understanding the complexity of bureaucratic interactions: the DOE’s Literacy Information and Communication System (LINCS) has a reentry toolkit and the Research Triangle Institute (RTI) has put together some system-to-system information.