Molly Lasagna

Guest columnist

Molly Lasagna is the executive director at the Tennessee Higher Education Initiative.

The Higher Education Act should be reauthorized.

Recently, I had the opportunity to meet with U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander’s staff to discuss the need to expand access to post-secondary education in prison.

Joined by Shon Holman, a formerly incarcerated student himself, we emphasized just how transformative education can be for people in prison. We also asked that the senator do something specific: Champion the repeal of the ban on Pell Grants for people in prison through the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act.

Back in 1994, during the “tough on crime” era, Congress enacted the Violent Crime and Law Enforcement Act, better known as the “1994 Crime Bill,” which, among other things, barred people in prison from accessing receiving federal Pell Grants.

After the law went into effect, a cascade of similar state-level barriers to post-secondary education in prison were passed. Collectively, those laws worked together to effectively ban the vast majority of people in prison from accessing post-secondary programming.

Shon, who was able to access post-secondary programming through the THEI-Nashville State partnership at the Turney Center Industrial Complex, is a textbook example of how life-changing post-secondary education in prison can be. In 2015, Shon enrolled in THEI and began taking classes toward an associate’s degree in political science. Since then he has gone on to finish his bachelor's degree and is working on a master's degree in educational leadership at East Tennessee State University.

At our meetings, he spoke of being in class among students with different sentence lengths, and how everybody in prison remains hopeful that through future criminal justice reform, they will have the chance to use their education in the free world.

While I was listening to him tell his story, I kept going back to Cyntoia Brown. Cyntoia did not know she was going to get out when she began matriculation in the Lipscomb LIFE program, but imagine how differently her case would be handled had she not taken that step to further her education and prepare herself for the possible eventuality of release.

Both of their stories are representative of what we already know about post-secondary education in prison: It increases economic opportunity for formerly incarcerated people, creates safer communities in and out of prison, reduces recidivism rates and cuts costs.

For example, a new report by the Vera Institute of Justice and Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality found that repealing the ban would increase employment rates and increase earnings of formerly incarcerated people by $383,251 in the first year alone. What’s more, it would also save Tennessee an estimated $5.9 million annually in prison expenditures through reduced recidivism rates.

Education is an opportunity for rehabilitation that should be offered to as many people in prison as possible. In my work at the Tennessee Higher Education Initiative, I have seen first-hand how prison education can serve as a disruptor of mass incarceration and the impact it has on people’s morale. For people in prison, education serves as a form of hope and a way to restore a lost sense of human dignity. Removing the ban on Pell Grants is common-sense reform that I support and hope that Congress will soon work towards achieving through the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act.

Molly Lasagna is the executive director at the Tennessee Higher Education Initiative.



