Why I Believe in Prison Education

Editor's note: UC Irvine professor Annie McClanahan (see her impressive CV below) delivered this talk to an overflow room as part of the campus series "What Matters to Me and Why" on Wednesday, January 28. My gratitude to her for allowing Citric Acid to print it.

When I was first invited to give this talk last year and I began to think about what I might say, a memory sprung immediately to my mind. It was early fall of 2020, deep in the pandemic, and I am sure I am not alone in admitting that I was myself deep in a state of depression. I had a six-year-old kid at home, I was Director of Graduate Studies in my department, I was teaching my online courses and trying desperately to write my second book, and yet it all felt entirely and completely meaningless. Like so many others, including I’m sure many of you, one of my only escapes was to take long walks around my neighborhood, and I often spent those walks on the phone with my best friend, who also happens to be an English professor. During one of those conversations, I remember crying a lot—I was probably crying about a bunch of things, but the main thing weighing on me was that I felt deep disillusionment with my professional life. None of it—not the research, not the administrative work, and a lot of times not even the teaching—felt enough. I didn’t feel like my skills were adequately meeting a real collective need. I wanted, I told her, to just…quit. My friend—a consummately patient listener—let me go on for a while, and then she stopped me. “You don’t need to quit,” she told me, “You need to find a project that inspires you and motivates you but that draws on what you already know how to do. Let’s come up with a plan.”

I was lucky that day—lucky to have a friend who reoriented me to problem-solving, and lucky because when she said it, I immediately had a thought. Roughly a year earlier, I’d attended a few meetings for UCI faculty interested in a new pilot project that would soon come to be called UCI-LIFTED, short for Leveraging Inspiring Futures Through Educational Degrees and designed to provide a BA degree for those incarcerated at Richard J Donovan Correctional Facility, a maximum security facility in Chula Vista, just south of San Diego and about a mile from the US-Mexico border. I’d served on a curriculum committee, and I’d also gotten to meet the person I am not embarrassed to say remains my personal hero, Keramet Reiter, UCI Professor of Criminology Law and Society and the founder and director of LIFTED.

But my involvement in the program had been not much more than a few meetings up until that point, and I had no idea whether things were even still moving ahead, especially given the catastrophic disruptions of the pandemic. Still, my friend needed to hear that I had a practical plan to get myself out of my despair, so I promised that when I got home, I’d email Keramet and tell her that I really wanted to be more involved in LIFTED. I did, and a year later I was part of a team of folks helping the first entering cohort to the program put together their applications to UCI. That first year, we had to do everything by hand, so we’d drive down to the prison, work with the students on their materials, which were mostly handwritten, and then set up their online application for them. I think Keramet singlehandedly typed two dozen application essays into UC’s online application system. A year after that, I was entering Donovan to teach my first class for the program.

LIFTED was not my first experience teaching incarcerated students. I was a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley from 2003-2010, and during that time I taught almost every semester with a program that was then called the Prison University Project, an Associates Degree program at San Quentin Correctional Facility. San Quentin is California’s oldest operating correctional facility and is located on one of the most beautiful pieces of property in the Bay Area: on a kind of headland near San Rafael, between the Golden Gate and Richmond bridges. Set up high, it overlooks the ocean--parts of it look like the 19^th-century building it is, with castle-like turrets and old stone, but you can see guards with guns up in watch-towers, and there are of course lots of very large metal gates to walk through. There are lovely manicured gardens in parts, and elsewhere lots of concrete. The program at San Quentin was founded in the late 1990s as an entirely volunteer initiative run through Patten College, a small Christian college in Oakland. Although many of the volunteer instructors were faculty or graduate students at UC Berkeley, the program could not be formally embedded in the public university system because in 1994, Bill Clinton’s crime bill had eliminated Pell Grant eligibility for incarcerated students, forcing hundreds of state and federally-funded college programs to close. By the time I started teaching for PUP in 2004, it was serving hundreds of students per year. I taught courses ranging from a remedial writing course to literature classes where I taught Shakespeare and Kafka.

When I remember my experience teaching at San Quentin, part of me remembers how incredibly hard it was. Every object we brought into the prison was examined by correctional staff, and it wasn’t uncommon for a book or article you intended to teach to get taken away from you at the gate. Correctional officers were deeply suspicious of the program, and keen-eyed to keep track of potential “overfamiliarity.” I remember vividly a particular officer who would mutter every week as we came through the sallyport about how his kids couldn’t afford a UC education while these “low lifes” were getting it for free. San Quentin housing was de facto racially segregated, and violence and chaos meant it was common to come to class only to discover that all the students of a given racial group were absent because their housing unit was locked down. Resources were scarce—classes were taught in trailers while a writing tutoring study hall, which I ran for a couple semesters, was held in dirty, inadequately lit rooms divided by cages. The program was profoundly under-resourced: as the director of the program recently noted in a letter marking its 30^th anniversary, they didn’t have an industrial pencil sharpener until six years into offering classes, and the first time they bought pocket dictionaries for the entire student body it was cause for celebration. Students wrote everything by hand, which meant reading and keeping track of everything was a constant strain on faculty. Students had no right to retain books or handouts or papers in their cells, which meant a student might show up to class without anything they had been given to study or to write.

And yet when we were close reading a poem or discussing a film or dissecting a run-on sentence, I would lose myself in the pleasure—and the challenge—of the work just like I would in any other classroom. Indeed, it’s no exaggeration to say that teaching at San Quentin taught me how to teach. In the same years I was spending one night a week teaching a two-hour class at San Quentin, during the day I was also teaching undergraduate writing courses at UC Berkeley. But it was my prison teaching where I really learned how to be effective in the classroom. One reason was that because San Quentin was an all-volunteer effort, most classes were team taught so that instructors could divide themselves over the two nights of classes. In my early years in the program, that meant I was teaching alongside instructors far more experienced than I was, and I was learning on the fly. The first course I taught was remedial writing, which meant I had to give myself a crash course on the grammar exercises the very experienced writing instructor I was co-teaching with had assigned. Like many people who grew up in a middle-class, English-speaking household, I had learned English syntax and grammar entirely intuitively: I was a good writer but I couldn’t identify parts of speech, couldn’t diagram a sentence, couldn’t explain why what simply “sounded right” to me was correct according to the rules. But because I was teaching students who were English second language learners, or who had learning differences, or who had completed their high school degree via in-prison GED programs and hadn’t had the educational opportunities I took for granted, I suddenly had to know these rules so I could effectively teach them. Later in my time teaching at San Quentin, I myself became the expert, and I had the chance to serve as a “mentor” to tenured full professors from Berkeley teaching in the program for the first time. That experience taught me a lot about becoming secure in my authority, something my students at San Quentin often forced me to confront. Whereas in my Berkeley teaching I was typically teaching a room full of 18 year olds, at San Quentin I was younger than almost all my students, and as a result I often felt insecure in my position. Many of my students were avid readers of history and knew more than I did about it; they had strong political and ethical and intellectual beliefs and, far more than my teenage Berkeley students, were never afraid to express themselves, even—perhaps especially—when they knew I might disagree. Learning to manage these spaces taught me both how to be confident in my authority and how to be flexible—taught me what it meant to lose the comfort that comes from knowing exactly what will happen next and exactly how to handle it, and to embrace the curiosity and sense of possibility that comes from realizing that the classroom can be a community of peers, learning and talking together.

But the main reason my experience at San Quentin changed me was my students. For my final class in the program, I designed a critical thinking course on the manifesto as a literary and rhetorical device where we read Plato’s Republic, the Declaration of Independence and 19^th-century feminist responses to it; hip-hop lyrics, professions of religious faith; and platforms from both mainstream and marginal contemporary political parties. For their final paper, I asked my students to write their own manifestos. And the experience got me thinking a lot about my own beliefs, and how they’d been shaped by my experience in the program. Teaching there made me believe in what I came to see as miracles of human will, the kind of will it took to write and re-write difficult essays without a computer or even a typewriter, to read difficult texts in a noisy, chaotic room, to develop organizational skills in a situation when your papers and books can be gone through, discarded, and disorganized beyond your control. It made me believe in miracles of individual courage, the kind of courage it takes to re-enter the classroom after years and years outside it, and even when your earliest educational experiences hardly inspired faith or confidence.

My beliefs about higher ed for incarcerated people are borne out by the facts. In that context, it’s worth discussing at least a few facts about the context of incarceration, and about the history of higher education in prisons, before I talk about my experience with UCI-LIFTED over the last four years. As you probably know, but as is worth remembering, the US incarcerates more people per capita than almost every other nation.  For decades, the U.S. has been engaged in a globally unprecedented experiment to make every part of its criminal legal system more expansive and more punitive.

As a result, incarceration has become the nation’s default response to crime. 70 percent of convictions result in confinement — far more than other developed nations with comparable crime rates. Even “progressive” states like California, with incarceration rates below the national average, continue to lock people up at more than double the rates of some of our closest international allies. The average sentence length in the US is more than 5 years, five times the average in peer countries. One third of CA incarcerated individuals, and the plurality of students in LIFTED, are serving life sentences, with the majority of those so-called LWOP, or Life Without Possibility of Parole. 40% of incarcerated people serving life sentences were 25 or younger when they committed the crime for which they are incarcerated.

Beginning in 2010, but most appreciably in 2020 during the COVID pandemic, many US states began to see a decline of their prison populations. The US dropped from having the world’s highest incarceration rate in the world to being “only” in the top five. Yet even at the peak of so-called decarceration in 2022, the size of US prison population had only declined to the levels previously seen in 2005, which were themselves roughly 3.5 times higher than they’d been in 1980 when the War on Drugs began. In 2023, 39 states saw increases in the size of prison populations, despite continued decreases in violent and property crime rates. In 2024, as I was teaching my fall course at Donovan, Californians may have congratulated themselves on voting against Trump, but they also overwhelmingly voted in favorof Proposition 36, which undid some of the modestly progressive sentencing reforms that had enabled the state’s small efforts at decarceration, reclassifying some drug and theft crimes—including petty shoplifting charges—as felonies. They also voted against Proposition 6, which would have repealed the part of the California constitution that allows “involuntary servitude”—aka slavery—as a punishment for crime from the California Constitution.

Given these horrors, what difference does education make? Around 40% of incarcerated people have not completed high school or its equivalent, more than twice the rate in the overall population. Yet when incarcerated people receive an education while inside, recidivism rates drop very substantially, from a re-incarceration rate of around 60 or 70% to a mere 5% for those who earn a BA and near zero for those who earn a Masters Degree. For every $1 spent on education for incarcerated people, there is an economic return of $5, and a college education is significantly less expensive than the cost of incarcerating someone for a single year in California.

For those reasons, educating incarcerated people is economically, politically, and socially rational, but there are far deeper reasons too. I think most of us who work in higher education see education as a human right, but it’s one rarely afforded to those who are incarcerated. As faculty often argue when making the case for stronger state support for higher education, access to education is an essential condition for personal transformation, success, and well-being. It is a crucial way that individuals find purpose, meaning, and dignity. It is also a vital social resource: not only a human right but also a gift—indeed, the best kind of gift, which is both useful and beyond utility, and which changes the person who gives it as much as the person who receives it.

In other words, education—especially in places where it is most needed, where it is most vital, where it runs the most against the forces of repression and punishment—brings purpose and meaning and dignity not just to the student, but to the teacher as well. It was that feeling, I think, that I had lost in 2021, and that my experience with LIFTED restored to me.

Before I talk about my own experience in LIFTED, let me tell you a little about how the program, and others like it, came to be possible. Earlier, I mentioned that there used to be hundreds of prison college programs: as of the early 1990s, more than 20,000 incarcerated students were receiving Pell Grants to fund their education inside, double the number in the 1970s when the program began. However in those same decades, the prison population itself was exploding, increasing five-fold over just 20 years. In 1994, President Bill Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, one of the most expansive crime laws in modern history.  Among its many provisions, the law abolished the Pell Grant Program for all prison students, including nonviolent offenders. As a result, public funded institutions were basically prohibited from engaging in carceral education projects. But that began to change in California in 2014, when the state legislature began funding the California community colleges to educate incarcerated students. As of today, every single CDCR facility has at least two community colleges offering associates degree pathways, with thousands of incarcerated students graduating with Associates degrees every year. Noting the incredible success of these programs, in 2018, UCI faculty, led by Keramet Reiter, began discussing the possibility of a UCI BA program that would admit those community college graduates as junior transfers. In 2020, in the midst of COVID, CDCR and UCI signed an MOU officially launching UCI-LIFTED, which would be the first top ten public university to admit, matriculate, and graduate in-prison students with a BA. Initially, the program was funded with state funding, federal grants, philanthropic grants, and the UC Blue and Gold Opportunity Program. But at the same time things were changing in California, they were also changing at the federal level. In 2015, the Obama administration launched the Second Chance Pell Experimental Sites initiative, a pilot project which funded roughly 70 colleges and universities to provide in-person, online, and hybrid education in carceral institutions across the country. This program was expanded in 2020 and in 2021, the Trump administration finally repealed the ban on Pell Grants for in-prison higher ed. In 2024, UCI-LIFTED became the second program in the country to be approved for Pell Grants.

LIFTED students are admitted to UCI as junior transfers via the exact the same application process as traditional community college students. They enter as a cohort and take almost all their courses together, which means there are very limited options but a very strong sense of community—I often tell folks that LIFTED is a lot like a residential honors college or small liberal arts school, where students live and study together in a group. Their BA is in Sociology, and as of a year and a half ago they also have the option to receive a minor in English, which is the part of the program I coordinate, and almost all of them chose to include it. Courses are taught seminar-style and are entirely in person.

Students have access to a CDCR version of Canvas and a still partial, but consistently improving, set of research tools. We have so far graduated two cohorts, both of them achieving amazing rates of Latin honors as well as honors in sociology.

Of course there’s a lot about teaching at Donovan that’s wildly different from teaching on main campus. The institution is located in Chula Vista just south of San Diego—to get there, you drive for almost 2 hours along the beautiful coastline but end up just about a mile from the US-Mexico border, in an area that’s mostly Amazon warehouses, ICE and border facilities, and other carceral institutions. There’s a shooting range right behind the yard where we teach, so you can often hear the sound of gunfire. To get into my classroom, I go through a gatehouse, a security checkpoint, a sallyport surrounded by a massive lethal electric fence, and then another security checkpoint; once I’m inside, I walk across a large open yard where incarcerated people are doing everything from playing pickleball to strumming guitars. Entering the education building, I check in with yet another correctional officer and let them know I’m ready for them to let my students into the classroom. When my students enter my classroom, I greet not just them but also about a few incredibly well-behaved dogs, as many of our students are involved in a dog training program.

Yet in many other ways, it’s incredibly, sometimes overwhelmingly, easy to forget where I am. I teach in a classroom not so very different from those on main campus—indeed, it’s probably a bit nicer than teaching in one of the social science trailers! There’s a lot of UCI swag around, both posters on the walls and stickers and lanyards—my LIFTED students are incredibly proud of their institution, anteater fans to a one. In terms of curriculum, the courses I teach through LIFTED are also almost identical to the kind of courses I teach to upper-division English majors on main campus. I’ve taught a course on gothic fiction, for which they slogged through Henry James’s very challenging novella Turn of the Screw and in which they loved James Vandermeer’s gothic eco-horror novel Annihilation. I’ve taught a class on contemporary experimental novels, and twice taught a class called “The Novel as Sociology,” which attempts to make connections between their Sociology major and their English minor by focusing on novels that attempt to understand aspects of the social world—we just finished reading the 19^th century novel Hard Times, Charles Dickens’ excoriating criticism of industrialization and utilitarianism. We talk about literary devices like metaphor and image; we close read passages together and discuss the big questions novels ask and answer. We talk about paragraph structure and sentence syntax; about argument and evidence; about how to move from an intuitive feeling about a literary text to something more interpretive.

When people ask me about teaching at Donovan compared to on-campus, I often describe that the level of engagement. I love my LIFTED students’ candor—perhaps because they are adults with a wealth of life experience, they do not hesitate to tell me they hate a novel, or that they don’t like an assignment, or that they just didn’t have time to do the reading this week (though they almost always have). I love their passion, their curiosity, their honesty, and perhaps especially I love how personally they take the reading—how pissed off they get when a character does something they don’t think is plausible and how able they are to see the connections to their own lives. One of the most powerful classroom experiences I’ve had at Donovan was teaching the novella “The Yellow Wallpaper.” An early feminist classic, “The Yellow Wallpaper” describes a woman being treated for what we’d now call post-partum depression by being essentially locked in a room—although I hadn’t understood the story to be about solitary confinement when I assigned it, the conversation we had made me understood that it was; in turn, it allowed my students to connect their own experiences with this work of 19^th century feminist fiction. The novelist George Elliot wrote that literature allows us to “be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and the joys of those who differ from [us] in everything but the broad fact of being struggling, erring human creatures.” In other words, literature teaches us how to see the world from the perspective of others and thus to learn compassion. When I teach at Donovan, I’m vividly reminded of this as the very best, most extraordinary, most utopian thing that literature can do: that it can make us feel for others, that it can make us think otherwise, that it can give us opportunities for conversations we don’t get to have in any other way.

Theorists of the university and theorists of the prison have thought about the relationship between these two institutions in a number of different ways. By the most common account, of course, the university and the prison are opposites: the prison is the darkness against which the university’s fiat lux can be measured; the university is the space of freedom which the prison forecloses. But other scholars have noted that they are less opposites than twins—both are what sociologists might call “total institutions,” enclaves where people live, work, and study under a system of regimented rules and “discipline.” By yet another account the university is complicit in the production and maintenance of the prison—the famous scholar of California prisons Ruth Wilson Gilmore, among others, has pointed out how the massive build-up of the carceral system in 1980s and 90s California depended on the UC system as a “supplier of efficiency expertise” for the California department of corrections.

All these ways of seeing the relationship are correct. And yet descriptions of the university and the prison as opposites, as analogues, or as collaborators also can’t quite accommodate what happens when prisons and universities more actively intersect. Both institutions are changed by this encounter, allowing knowledge to flow out of and between them: in particular, through their sociology work, students in LIFTED are producing vital knowledge about their own lives and the carceral institution in which they live. Through their sociology courses as well as in capstone and honors research seminars, LIFTED students are conducting incredibly compelling social research about prison education, prison communities, family support, and the obstacles to healing from trauma. Likewise, my own pedagogy has also been irrevocably changed by my teaching in LIFTED. In my first quarter teaching in LIFTED, I was immediately reminded of something I had noticed at San Quentin too, namely that my incarcerated students were even more invested in the nuances of grades than my UCI students—far more likely to want to know why they’d gotten a 91 whereas their friend had gotten a 92.  I came to feel that traditional grading systems mirrored aspects of prison life—the idea of highly structured, seemingly objective rules that have to be followed perfectly in order to produce a sense of security and stability. That realization made me want to use other ways of assessing and responding to student writing, and I began to develop various systems of what’s often called “ungrading,” using more quantitative feedback and an emphasis on effort, engagement, and improvement. Realizing I didn’t want to use a carceral system outside of the prison anymore than inside it, I used those insights and approaches not only in my LIFTED classes, but in my main campus classes as well.

I can’t possibly know any more than a tiny fraction of what it took for my students to get to LIFTED—what it takes to get into this program, to earn your first two years of credits through the community colleges, to deal with the CDCR bureaucracy and the community college bureaucracy and the UCI bureaucracy. I can’t know what it’s like to have to read 200 pages of dense literary fiction every week while surrounded by noise, or to write essays when English isn’t your first language, or you have learning differences, or you are dealing with trauma, and you’re also taking three other courses at the same time. 

But what I can know is what I’ve seen, in my LIFTED classrooms, over the last four years—and what I’ve seen is nothing short of radically amazing. I’ve seen them become better readers—more patient, more open, more willing to suspend their disbelief or put up with density and opacity. I’ve seen them become vastly more confident in their abilities as readers. I have seen them engage in complex, challenging, and often conflictual dialogue and debate and to do so with rigor, and seriousness, and an immense amount of generosity.

Put simply, my experience in LIFTED has made me believe deeply in prison education, but it’s also helped renew and restore my sense of why college matters.  My students in LIFTED are in college for a wide range of reasons. They are in college for their families, for their siblings and parents, for their kids and partners, for their nieces and nephews. They are in college to honor their ancestors, or there are there to break a family pattern. They are there for practical reasons as well as for love of learning. They are there to change their lives, whether that happens in front of the parole board or in the pages of a book. And they’ve changed my life, too, helping me understand that when we are able to say even something as simple as “This thesis statement can be clearer”—when we take the patience to revise an essay or to teach someone else how to do it, when we have the humility to say everything could always be better, clearer, stronger—we all receive something intangible but crucial in return.

Annie McClanahan is an Associate Professor of English at UCI. She is the author of the 2016 Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and 21st Century Culture and the forthcoming book Beneath the Wage: Tips, Tasks, and Gigs in the Age of Service Work. She is the Director of the UC Materialist Institute for Research and the co-President of the Council of UC Faculty Associations. She is also a Faculty Co-Director for UCI-LIFTED, the first in-prison BA-degree completion program in the UC system. LIFTED enables incarcerated individuals to apply to transfer into UCI as juniors and earn a bachelor’s degree from UCI while serving their sentence. Annie coordinates LIFTED’s English minor and supports faculty in learning to teach in carceral settings with a focus on trauma-informed pedagogy.