Improving higher education in prisons
ITHAKA supports justice-impacted individuals, empowering them to improve their lives by increasing access to high-quality higher education programs and library resources in prisons.
Through our research and active engagement with the justice-impacted community and the organizations that support it, we aspire to see more students learn and earn degrees while in prison. We also hope to spark wider discussion about mass incarceration, inequities in the system, and to advocate for the power of education to change people’s lives.
Increasing access to learning materials in prisons
To get an equitable, quality education, justice-impacted students require access to library and educational materials. This material is seldom available on the inside, due largely to lack of technology and internet access, precluding students from having the materials they need and developing the research skills that are a vital component of a postsecondary education. Our JSTOR Access in Prison initiative is changing this.
Building off work that began in 2007 when the Bard Prison Initiative asked JSTOR to provide an offline index of the archive to its students, JSTOR Labs has developed a more robust, next-generation tool to support incarcerated students conducting research without access to the internet. Additionally, we have created a version of JSTOR that can be accessed directly by students. Using these offline and direct access solutions, our goal is to make JSTOR freely available to all US higher education in prison programs and affordably accessible to all incarcerated people globally.
Producing research to guide programs and policy
Higher education in prison is at a critical juncture. With the restoration of Pell Grants for incarcerated students, a strong and growing cohort of college- and university affiliated programs are expanding access to education on the inside. Our research focuses on ensuring that incarcerated adults are afforded the opportunity to receive a high-quality education that leads to positive outcomes.
- Through a multi-year project in collaboration with Ennead Lab, Ithaka S+R is reimagining prison educational spaces to foster better educational outcomes and support prison reform efforts.
- COVID-19 accelerated the availability of technology in prisons, and our Ithaka S+R team is conducting research on the information and technology landscape to enable educational programs to advocate for their students’ needs.
- Incarcerated students must learn in an environment that tightly controls and limits access to information. Ithaka S+R is undertaking research to better understand how media review policies, censorship, and self-censorship intersect and impact student learning.
Deepening public understanding
By bringing previously unheard voices of justice-impacted individuals into college and high school classrooms, into our libraries, and into public discourse, we are promoting learning and dialogue.
Our American Prison Newspapers: 1880-2020 project, led by our Reveal Digital team, has digitized hundreds of newspapers published in US prisons over the past 200 years and made them openly accessible online. The resulting collection is being preserved by our Portico team, which manages the long-term preservation of digital content at scale, including significant historical newspaper collections. Through the work of our Reveal Digital fellow, we’ve produced supporting materials for teaching with this primary source collection and a JSTOR Daily editor commissioned articles designed to highlight individual newspapers and improve our collective understanding of mass incarceration.
The Ithaka S+R team is also making efforts to spotlight and preserve the first-hand experiences of people who are currently, or have been previously, incarcerated in order to make progress toward necessary reforms and combat stigma. With funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), our first project in this area aims to understand how creative works by people in prison circulate beyond the prison and to determine how they might be ethically collected and preserved.
Read related stories on JSTOR Daily
We invite the broader community to learn about our work, use our resources, and connect with us.