Neal Stahl repeatedly tried to maintain momentum in a college program before his incarceration. It was UW-Madison’s Odyssey Beyond Bars at Oakhill Correctional Facility that later kept him going.
Since his release in January 2021, Stahl has completed his associate degree from North Central Technical College and is working toward his bachelor’s degree at UW-Green Bay.
“It helped just kind of reaffirm to me that academia was a space that I wanted to be in, and not only it’s where I wanted to be, but that it was a place that I was capable of being successful as well,” Stahl said. “That was something that I always questioned because I had failed previously attempting to go to school.”
Growing popularity
During his presidency, Barack Obama launched the Second Chance Pell pilot program, which allowed select colleges, including Milwaukee Area Technical College, to offer Pell-funded programs to incarcerated students. An expansion of the pilot program under the Trump administration added Madison Area and Moraine Park technical colleges before Congress reinstated full eligibility for prisoners in late 2020.
When the program started in Wisconsin prisons, in 2018, participation was small: About 35 Pell Grant recipients enrolled in the Second Chance program. Another 30 students were earning college credit through programs funded by private donors to universities.
This fall, Jones expects nearly 600 students across 22 correctional facilities will be earning some type of college credit.
Colleges also have offered vocational training, adult education programs and mobile academies in correctional facilities for decades with funding from the state.
There are waitlists to get into college programs, though how many people are waiting to get into college programs is unknown, said Ben Jones, education director for the Department of Corrections. Interest isn’t tracked during intake the way it is for the vocational programs, which have a persistent waitlist of about 9,000 people.
UW-Madison has Odyssey Beyond Bars and college jumpstart programs in partnership with UW-Green Bay. Marquette University partners with Racine Correctional to offer bachelor’s degree programs with grant funding, and technical colleges such as Moraine Park are hoping students will pair a trades program, such as woodworking, welding or cosmetology, with a business management degree.
Needed approvals
A number of approvals must be attained before any new programs can be eligible for Pell grants. In Wisconsin, a program must be greenlit by the state Department of Corrections, the university or college’s accrediting agency and the U.S. Department of Education.
Thanks to a $5.7 million Prison Education Initiative grant in 2021, students enrolled in an associate degree program, piloted through a partnership with UW-Madison and UW-Green Bay, won’t need to apply for Pell grant assistance this year. But even when those students will need to apply for financial aid for the 2024-25 school year, Moreno said the program still will need assistance from philanthropic sources and foundation dollars to make it work.
While small business administration and liberal arts transfer degrees are highly sought, Jones said the DOC also is interested in seeing degrees in high-demand careers — computer science, health care, engineering. But each of those industries becomes a Herculean feat to integrate into correctional facilities and ensure job access upon release.
“Those are areas that I’m interested in developing, but they have their own challenges. So, in the area of health care, it’s really hard to get licensed with a felony conviction … and in the area of computer sciences, it’s super challenging to do the training for computer science with the lack of access to the internet,” Jones said.
When Pell access was revoked, its effect in Wisconsin was limited. Moraine Park Technical College, as well as a few others, taught some credit-fulfilling courses starting in the 1980s, Jones said.
“There was not this big, robust system,” he said. “There was a college here and a college there, a course here and a course there.”
Attitudes changed. Programs expanded.
Tommy Thompson was governor in the 1990s when Wisconsin’s prison population nearly tripled, going from 6,953 in June 1990 to closing out December 1999 with 20,111 incarcerated.
By early 2022, however, when Thompson was serving as interim president of the UW System, he said he wanted to increase prisons’ access to higher education.
But the reality remains that prisons were built and operate as correctional facilities, not colleges — setting up myriad challenges to increasing access within the Department of Corrections’ facilities.
“Everyone’s talking about larger class sizes, expanding their programming inside … as we look at the facilities, the individual DOC facilities and what they’re capable of hosting, it’s a different story,” Moreno said. “Prisons were not built to be institutions of learning. They were built to warehouse people.”
One of the starkest differences is the lack of internet access for incarcerated students. While students on campus can register for classes, schedule academic advising and access course materials online, that’s not the case in Wisconsin’s prisons.
Secure internet connections and monitored devices that incarcerated students can use to access classwork exist, but they’re heavily restricted, Jones said. And the relatively small Department of Corrections’ IT department supports access across 37 correctional facilities, with educational technology needing to be juggled with other basic care technologies.
Some programs still fill out forms with pencil and paper, Moreno said. Most of the meetings for UW-Madison and UW-Green Bay programs, from enrollment to advising, are done in person in the correctional facilities.
It’s all “necessary and good,” Moreno said, but the process is time-consuming in ways different than for those present on campus. Just the application for the program alone can take the better part of a day to fill out, with a full-time employee needing to assist every prospective student.
And while Pell grants can help cover the costs of running college programs in prisons, the amount students receive doesn’t cover the full cost of instruction, Moreno said. Universities and colleges have to pick up the rest of the tab.
“The bottom line is what we’ve learned from the Second Chance Pell experiment is Pell is necessary to get things going in the prison from a higher education perspective, but it doesn’t represent a complete solution,” Moreno said. “Colleges are having to seek additional sources of funding and support in order to prepare and offer these courses to students in prison.”
Robert Taliaferro Jr. was almost disqualified from the Odyssey Program at Oakhill Correctional Facility because of his previous writing and college education experience.
During his nearly 40-year sentence for a violent crime committed in the 1980s, Taliaferro, 68, wrote for The Prison Mirror while housed at Minnesota Correctional Facility at Stillwater, one of Wisconsin’s out-of-state contracted facilities; he’d nearly completed his bachelor’s degree while incarcerated before being moved back to the Wisconsin corrections system, which didn’t allow inmates to complete bachelor’s degrees.
The main concern, Taliaferro recalled, was that his background would be intimidating to others in the Odyssey Beyond Bars program. Like most of the Odyssey programs, Beyond Bars caters to those who have yet to succeed in higher ed or have never set foot in a college classroom.
But getting into Odyssey’s program made Taliaferro want to pursue more education upon release. When he was paroled in 2022, he finished his bachelor’s degree at Metro State University in Minnesota before starting on a master’s in Urban Development Initiatives.
The way Taliaferro sees it, getting his education has made him a productive citizen who’s contributing to society rather than being a drain on public dollars while incarcerated.
“(Education is) a stepping stone for a lot of people,” he said. “Let’s fund a future.”
Pell grants give inmates another shot at college (UW-Green Bay participates in pilot program as a partner), Journal Times, Oct. 23
