From prison to college: Consortium puts inmates in a positive 'pipeline'
From The Boston Globe:
Prison changed Jose Bou’s life in a way he never expected.
While serving a 12-year sentence for drug trafficking, Bou earned a bachelor’s degree from Boston University through a special program for incarcerated students. Since his release seven years ago, Bou has become a community college professor and a mentor to others caught up in the correctional system.
Inmates like Bou are a rarity in Massachusetts; higher education degree programs have long been available to just a small number of prisoners in a few correctional institutions at any given time. Now, that’s about to change: A new consortium of more than a dozen Massachusetts colleges plans to help make the chance to earn a college degree accessible to more inmates throughout the state.
Bou says the initiative could transform many more lives.
“We need a real education,” said Bou, 43. “It’s nice to give them work skills and fatherhood skills, but I need a piece of paper that puts me close to equal footing with the rest of the workforce.”
The Educational Justice Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was recently awarded a $250,000 grant from the Vera Institute of Justice and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop a “pipeline” for incarcerated people to get their degree.