In February 2014, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced his support for restoration of funding for higher-education opportunities in prison. It was an announcement ahead of its time, and neither the Legislature nor the media seemed prepared to talk about it. The following month, a poll found that a majority of New Yorkers would support state funding for college in prison. But the political stars did not align, and the moment passed.

New York is a progressive beacon on issues from climate change to reproductive rights. But ironically, President Donald Trump's Department of Education is expanding college-in-prison while New York has yet to take action. With a supportive governor and a state Legislature producing some of the most progressive policies in the nation, now should be the time for New York to take the lead in restoring state-based financial aid for the incarcerated.

We know education can break the cycle of crime and incarceration. But laws were passed in the 1990s to bar people in prison from receiving federal financial aid (Pell grants) or New York state aid (Tuition Assistance Program or "TAP" grants). Most people in prison cannot afford college tuition, nor can they earn enough to pay for college while incarcerated. Without Pell and TAP, colleges cannot provide education at the scale of mass incarceration.

The U.S. Department of Education launched its "Second Chance Pell" initiative in 2015. Treating tuition assistance as an experimental intervention, the initiative releases financial aid to a limited number of college-in-prison programs in order to measure the impact of college-in-prison on various outcomes such as post-release employment and rates of re-incarceration. In 2015, 65 colleges in 27 states were selected for this experiment, including several in New York. Now the U.S. Department of Education has announced that in 2020 the initiative will be expanded to include more colleges and universities.

It would seem an opportune moment for New York to take action to support state-based financial aid for incarcerated students. The absence of such action would have some curious implications.

The experimental nature of the Department of Education's initiative means the federal government could cancel it at any time. This is a familiar condition in an era in which temporary executive branch action has supplanted legislative change.

Meanwhile, some programs in New York are running almost exclusively on the funding provided by the Second Chance Pell experiment. North Country Community College (a SUNY college) launched a program in 2016 exclusively based on the availability of these funds. The program serves four prisons in New York, but if the U.S. Department of Education decided to wrap up its experiment, the program could be starved for funds overnight, with no state systems in place to keep it going.

State financial aid programs are already available to incarcerated people in one-third of U.S. states, according to a recent study. It is time for New York to join their ranks.

Such action would ensure New York remains a leader on this key progressive issue — reducing mass incarceration by reintroducing rehabilitation as an alternative to punishment. New York is well known for having several world-class, privately funded college-in-prison programs, notably those of Cornell, Columbia, NYU and Bard College. Activists, academics, foundations and donors have spent 20 years demonstrating the importance of higher education in prison with the ultimate aim of effecting real institutional change, and the restoration of financial aid is exactly that. New York can seize the moment, build on its successes, and cement its leadership role in reducing mass incarceration, by restoring the TAP in the state correctional system.