Joe Biden took away our hope in prison overnight. Now he's given it back.
This storyis published in partnership with Open Campus, a nonprofit newsroom focused on higher education. Subscribe to College Inside, an Open Campus newsletter on the future of postsecondary education in prison.
Three decades ago, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act—also known as the 1994 crime bill—took a sledgehammer to federal financial aid for incarcerated students. On July 1, though, people in prison were finally again eligible to receive Pell Grants for higher education for the first time in 29 years.
With the return of Pell, it will take colleges and corrections departments a while to figure out exactly what these new prison education programs will entail. But it’s a significant step forward toward expanding college access for people in prison.
AdvertisementEver since I started covering prison education in fall 2021, I’ve been asking everyone I meet who was incarcerated before 1994, “What was that moment like when Pell Grants went away?”
I’ve talked to a dozen men and women—most of whom are lifers now in the 50s, 60s, or 70s (and at least one octogenarian)—about the ebb and flow of prison education over the past four decades.
For many people inside, education was “here one day and gone the next,” essentially stranding thousands of incarcerated students in the middle of their degrees. Sean Pica, now the executive director of Hudson Link, entered prison in 1987 as a 16-year-old with a ninth grade education.
AdvertisementAfter a lot of false starts, he had finally earned 118 credits toward a bachelor’s from Skidmore College when the 1994 crime bill passed. “At this point, it’s not getting taken away because I fucked up,” he said. “So, in some ways, you’re a little resentful that I’m finally getting my shit together. And now I’m still not finishing.”
Advertisement Advertisement AdvertisementSkidmore came in and packed up their books and supplies with very little explanation, he said. “And then it was just gone.”
As the prison education pendulum has finally swayed back, we asked several lifers to share their experiences with Pell Grants before 1994, in their own words.
These stories have been edited and condensed for clarity.
“Gladiator school”
—An account from Ghostwrite Mike
AdvertisementAs the old-school California Youth Authority van pulled into the infamous Youth Training School, I thought my life was over. It was, at the time, California’s largest youth prison, known as “gladiator school.”
It was 1991. I’d spent the previous two years fighting and losing a juvenile court fitness hearing for a shooting I committed as a 16-year-old. I got transferred to adult court, refused a deal, lost a first-degree murder trial, and wound up sentenced to 25 years to life in prison. I was a classic case of what they today would call a “youth offender.” Back then, we were “superpredators.”
There was one redeemable thing about gladiator school—I discovered that the facility actually had a Pell-funded bachelor’s program in sociology from the University of La Verne. For a kid who acquired his GED in juvenile hall at the age of 16, being able to perhaps parlay my woes into a college degree was the only inspiring thing in my life.
Advertisement AdvertisementI eagerly enrolled and quickly knocked down 39 units. But then, in fall 1992, a race riot landed me time in solitary confinement, a DA referral, and a gnarly shipout to an even more volatile youth facility. Over the next 15 years, during which time Congress killed our access to Pell Grants, I spent most of my time in and out of administrative segregation.
It wasn’t until I was doing my last long-term stint in the hole that I started to contemplate a different mode of life on the inside. While in lockup, I’d received a reply letter from Thomas Aquinas College in Ojai, California, a renowned Jesuit school that taught the Great Books Series as its curriculum, responding to my request for donated paperback philosophy books. One of the professors there visited me regularly, became my friend, and caused me to contemplate universals, question my ethics, and deconstruct my malformed ideas about my purpose on the planet.
Advertisement AdvertisementI own my mistakes, going on the ride of being a follower trying to survive the idiotic politics I was too afraid to buck. My beef is with the obstacles placed in the way of the academic climb I’ve tried to make since then, after I changed my life, flipped my script, and started to explore my capacity to exist beyond the limiting confines of what I’d been indoctrinated to accept for myself.
Advertisement AdvertisementI’ve been on never-ending college program waitlists for nearly 10 years, while staying discipline-free, dropping custody points, and earning my way from maximum-security prisons to the medium-security facility I’ve been at since 2018. After every transfer, I had to start the waitlist climb again, from the bottom rung of a ladder that placed me last due to my life sentence.
AdvertisementIt took me more than 30 years to get back on track. 1992 to 2023—do that math.
Ghostwrite Mike is a student at Coastline College, transferring to Merced College in the fall. He’s a published poet, illustrator, producer, and journalist. His work has appeared in Exchange, a literary magazine published by Columbia University School of the Arts. He’s the co-founder of Barz Behind Bars (B³), and managing editor of the BarzOnline literary blog for the Ben Free Project, and a consultant for the nonprofit Radical Reversal.
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Read More“I need to find my way out of here”
—An account from Charmaine Pfender
I arrived at Muncy in 1985 and college classes were already a mainstay. I took my GED, then enrolled at Bloomsburg College. We had two classes a semester and Pell paid it all. A couple years later, Bill Clinton ended Pell Grants for prisoners. A lot of people were pissed.
Advertisement AdvertisementI could no longer afford to go. I had to drop out of college. I hated to do that, because I was emotionally abused as a child and my father was illiterate. He always told me I’d never amount to anything and wasn’t smart enough to do anything with my life. So, the fact that I had a life sentence made me feel he was right, until I discovered college.
AdvertisementCollege changed everything. It made me feel like an adult for the first time. And I discovered my identity and intelligence. When it went away, I was dejected and sad I couldn’t accomplish graduating. I would have been the first in my family.
I focused all my attention on my apprenticeship—a multitrade program through the Pennsylvania Department of Labor. My certification is as a maintenance builder, repairer, servicer. It took six years to graduate. We had to build custom furniture for staff to fund the program.
AdvertisementAfter I graduated, I went on to specialize in carpentry at the maintenance department for 15 years. I also went to school for computers, and then took a course in AutoCAD to use with carpentry. And then took Accounting I, II, and III. I planned a future in carpentry, to open my own business. I just need to find my way out of here to do it.
Advertisement AdvertisementCharmaine Pfender has served 35 years in the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections. She is 1 of 3 original founders of the nonprofit Let’s Get Free: The Women and Trans Prisoner Defense Committee.
“There were good people who cared more about my future than I did”
—An account from Mark Wilson
Methamphetamine derailed my 1987 high school graduation. I was then locked in a small jail cell facing murder charges three weeks later. Soon thereafter, I was sentenced to life within the Oregon State Correctional Institution.
AdvertisementI was relieved to find that prison was much more like a college than the violent war zone I feared, thanks to the education opportunities offered by Pell Grants. The prison offered two- and four-year college degrees, vocational training, and apprenticeships in numerous professions. Approximately 20 percent of the 1,000 prisoners at the prison were taking classes. New prisoners were constantly encouraged to join them, but I could not see a future for myself after being told I would die in a cage.
AdvertisementThankfully, there were good people here who cared much more about me and my future than I did. I thought I was done with school after a woman in the education department helped me quickly earn my high school diploma. But she immediately encouraged me to enroll in college.
Advertisement AdvertisementTruthfully, I was afraid of enrolling because I still believed the lie that I had internalized for so many years: that I was not smart enough to ever have academic success. Fortunately, she refused to take no for an answer and finally convinced me to give it a try. I eventually earned a two-year degree on March 17, 1995.
Earning a degree helped free me from a psychological prison that I had constructed for myself as a child. It made me finally believe that I could achieve and become so much more than I ever imagined possible. It is a sad irony that I discovered this freedom only in a cage, but prison education was an essential key to my personal freedom.
AdvertisementFinally understanding the value of education, I wanted to continue, but my educational journey came to a screeching halt. Congress abolished prisoner Pell Grants just six months before I graduated, and I could not pursue a four-year degree because both colleges quickly left in 1995.
Sadly, my fellow prisoners and I witnessed guards gleefully celebrating as college classes ended.
Mark Wilson, 54, has been an Oregon prisoner since 1987. He earned a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Oregon in 2019. Since 2019, he has served as a member of a legislative working group seeking to improve prison educational opportunities.
“It was like a badge of honor”
—An account from Craig Muhammad
Advertisement AdvertisementIn 1982, I started my incarceration in the Maryland State Penitentiary, where 90 percent of incarcerated persons were serving life sentences. The other 10 percent were serving virtual life sentences (50 years and above). College programs, such as Coppin State College (now Coppin State University, an HBCU), were one of the few tools available for an incarcerated person to improve himself and to stay positively focused away from destructive behavior. A few incarcerated people were also earning master’s degrees.
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I can vividly recall the disappointed faces after the college coordinator, Ms. Yolanda Hendricks, informed incarcerated people that the undergraduate program was going to cease operations. Being part of that program was like a badge of honor. It also encouraged students to earn their GEDs so they could go to college.
It really felt like I was in a comfort zone when I earned my GED and then went to college. I was so proud of myself when I walked across that stage in 1989 and received my degree.
The most devastating effect of the Pell Grant removal was an increase in hopelessness. With hopelessness comes an array of destructive and self-destructive behavior.
Ninety percent of all programs in the penitentiary were created by incarcerated people that had earned a degree or were in pursuit of a degree. When the Pell Grants ceased, many of those programs eventually stopped functioning. The programs that remained were taken over by prison officials and were only a fragment of what they once were.
Craig Muhammad has used education to reach back and help his incarcerated peers to become better human beings. He is a writing tutor for the University of Baltimore Second Chance College Program, a trained peer support specialist, and a facilitator for the Georgetown University Law Center Legal Writing Program.
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