Prison education often does not mean any internet, limited technique

From Tara Garcia MattsonCalmness

This story was originally published by CalmattersS Register about their ballots.

As Pell’s grants have become available to people who pursue prison degrees, every country and the federal prison bureau are trying to expand access to higher education.

However, what they have not done is the creation of a learning environment that maintains a college level survey. Some countries still prohibit prisoners from almost all technology, leaving students to go through textbooks and paper tasks. Others do not give students computers, forcing them to write fixed tablets documents that lack external keyboards. When students have the right technology, Internet access becomes a barrier, as safety risks the way people can abuse, exceed educational opportunities.

Getting a degree is one of the best ways to reduce the chances of completing back in prison after release. Some researchers have joined resistant drops In the percentage of recidivism, as this indicator is called, because of educational progress and its relationship with landing a good job.

But the United States’s criminal approach to imprisonment is confronted with the promise that education has a more recurrence. Bidhan Roy, Director of the Kal State Education Program Los Angeles, has studied the restoration approach in Norwegian closed And it emphasizes the contrast.

“The concept in Norway is that the time you serve is the punishment, and the job of the prison is to prepare the resident to become your neighbor again,” Roy said. “When you think so, it changes the purpose of what you do there. Why not give research skills and access to the Internet?”

Slow progress

When Roy first began to develop Cal State La Initiative to complete the prison About a decade ago, students had to do all their work on paper. In order to give way to prisoners to conduct research, Roy will pair them with a campus peer that can go to the library on their behalf and print the Roy materials to return to prison. After students began to use desktops from classrooms in prison, he pre -loaded the academic articles of the thumb that could explore offline. Since the fall of 2023, its students have been able to look for a much broader universe than academic articles online through EBSCO, a company that aggregates online research databases. The California Department of Correction and Rehabilitation has purchased access to EBSCO for students in all prisons of the country.

Little by little Roy’s hours improved for both instructors and students. Specializing manuscript essays, he said, was a nightmare on its own. And the students blossomed as scientists with the power to define their own research programs – a level of autonomy, which sharply contrasts with their otherwise hypercontrolled life inside.

“There is an empowerment that comes from this, and the study of not only the narrow research skills, but also the wider bits,” Roy said.

However, students encounter walls.

The 42 -year -old Susan Carlson obtained GED in prison and then continued to receive two associated degrees before joining the bachelor’s program Roy worshiped. When she first started conducting lessons, they were only with textbooks and paper.

“It was awful,” she said. She loves and appreciates the laptop she now has at the California Women’s Institution in Chino, but the EBSCO database gives her access only to approved resources and “the library here is very small compared to the things we need,” she said. It turns out that she wants to have a Google equivalent to do her job.

“I understand why (this is not accessible) and I would not want to open any paths to criminal behavior,” Carlson said, but she is sure there is a way to ban criminal activity while still opening more than the network of people in prison.

In fact, other countries have invented it. Kansas, Ohio and Wisconsin have internet options for walls for students on a separate network that keeps the prison network and is still gaining access to students to websites suitable for education.

“We will be glad to see more countries directed in this direction,” said Ruth Delanie, who runs Unlock the potential initiative at the Vera Institute, a non -profit purpose of criminal justice. The initiative aims to expand high quality after secondary education in prison, and Delani’s team has been working with adjustments departments, as well as with education leaders in most states since 2012. Their early results inspire the Obama administration to allow some low -income students to have access to Pell grants. Congress approved This expansion during the Trump First Administration and came into force in 2023.

Yet, even in the best circumstances, prisoners are widely held by much of the human knowledge posted online. Unlike the K-12 schools, where filters are designed to limit students’ access to dangerous or inappropriate websites and otherwise allow students to freely browse-on-the-list in black list-they work with whitelists: the facilities identify specific sites that users can have access and the rest of the Internet are blocked.

Both methods protect students from more websites than necessary to maintain an order and safety. In the K-12 schools, Marking found, now part of Calmatters High schools kept students from sexual education websites, LGBTQ resources, Wikipedia and a wide range of other websites looking for while doing homework. In prisons, Delani said, the white approach leads to a “very closed version of the Internet”.

For students in freedom, restrictions cooperate their educational opportunities. Carlson finished her bachelor’s degree this spring, but worries that the accredited will not get her so much that she would.

“When I enter the career world, when I go out and go to apply for a job and work to others, I don’t want to have stunned growth because of such things,” Carlson said.

National trends

Last year, the Vera Institute released a report on quality, justice and scale of prison education, evaluation of the progress of each country in 15 indicators. Two quality measures were technology and academic research and the access of the library. California received “green” for both measures, a sign that the system offers “adequate” access, but Carlson’s research experience illustrates the boundaries of “adequate”.

On a national scale, the Vera Institute called the technology of improvement. Only 17 states were labeled “adequate” to provide technology that shrinks digital division and maintains the quality of education. Only 12 struck the same brand when it comes to providing access to academic research materials and library services.

In 2016 Internet access with relations with the right to education.

Delanie said prison administrators are often afraid of Internet access for students to lead to violence or harm or inside or outside prison. But she said fear, though legitimate, seems to be overworked.

“There is a lot of evidence that people who go to prison college do not participate in the activities you should worry about,” Delani said. Students qualify for prison education programs only after they have a record of good behavior and even minor violations can expel them. They take the opportunity seriously.

Joe Tragert, Vice President of EBSCOED product strategy, EBSCO Education Department, has helped create a prison version of the EBSCO research database, which has a billion items, including academic articles and media archives that users can search. In prison, users can read and download resources only once they are approved, but can carry out their own searches and request access to documents. Tragert said he hears how dedicated people are to pursue their degrees.

“This is their ticket either to go out and stay out or just go through the day,” Tragert said.

Limited

Teresa Toriches, 66 -year -old, completed her bachelor’s degree in liberal research this spring through the Roy Program at the California Institution for Women. She said Ebsco was her main research resource and while she was full of sources, she came across a dead end, trying to study the conditions in Palestine last summer.

“A lot of the information that interests me is just not in the media,” Toricheslass said at the time. “It is very rarely covered in the media.” Outside, she said she would probably turn to social media for her research. Inside, it was not an option.

She also faced Wi-Fi problems when working on her school work. Wi-Fi is only available in certain common parts and cells that happen close enough to take this signal. She is lucky for a while, but when she moves through the hall to take a cell with better sunlight, she didn’t happen to her, she can leave her access to Wi-Fi behind her. She discovered this only after it was too late.

Over the past academic year, her routine was to go to the noisy living room to search for EBSCO for documents she needed, or to enter her software for a course to download details of the assignment and then return to her room to continue working offline. The interruption of this workflow was the limited storage space for laptops issued by prison.

“My laptop stopped working because I had downloaded so many EBSCO articles,” Toricelass said. Another person in the prison education program said that the same thing happened to her after the withdrawal of only two large PDFs, but the more new laptops distributed by prison have more space.

As the California Department of Correction and Rehabilitation deploys more new hardware, it also expands students’ access to research resources. In addition to EBSCO, students are slowly gaining access to Jstor, another search database. Students who study in prisons through nearby college programs, such as Roy, gain access to the Jstor database through the existing college license, which means it is already paid.

Stacey Burnett who runs JSSTOR ACCESS IN PRISON InitiativeHe said many prisons offer an approach like EBSCO, where someone has to review and approve every student’s request for a document. Others have expanded access to a bulk approval tool. In some cases, state prison systems have approved bulk discipline; In Colorado, employees approved everything in Jstor.

“If it’s there, a student can read it,” Burnet said. They can limit access after a problem, but so far Burneta said this has not happened.

When Carlson reached prison, she was shocked by the low levels of women’s education around her. She went to a strict high school and learned how to read, write and conduct research. Others did not learn any of these skills. EBSCO and JSTOR offer a way to improve their education inside. But Carlson said that limited access to online research simply compiled the lack of education that many women received first.

“I feel that when it comes to education,” said Carlson, “The doors should be wide open.”

This article was Originally Published on CalMatters and was reissued under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Noderivatives License.