Greetings!
Last year, as protests across the nation challenged state violence against Black people in America, leaders across California affirmed and reaffirmed their commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion. We hope to see those same leaders assess and expand those commitments to ensure they include an often-overlooked population: currently and formerly incarcerated students.
The Campaign for College Opportunity partnered with Danny Murillo, a formerly incarcerated scholar who has made it his life’s mission to ensure incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people have the opportunity to go to college and change their lives, to produce our latest research brief,
The Possibility Report: From Prison to College Degrees in California.
The Possibility Report uplifts the voices of formerly incarcerated students from California’s public colleges and universities, who candidly and vulnerably share the challenges they faced transitioning from incarceration to a college campus. In listening to their stories, common barriers and recommendations for change emerged.
I encourage you to read the brief, understand the unique barriers currently and formerly incarcerated students face on their path toward a degree, and take action using the recommendations for college leaders and policymakers.
Ensuring college opportunity for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated students is part of our state’s obligation to racial justice. California’s history of “tough on crime” policies targeted and accelerated the mass incarceration of Black and Latinx Californians and built a school-to-prison-pipeline targeting young Black and Latinx boys.
While we work to dismantle a racist criminal “justice” system, we must simultaneously work to create anti-racist policies that facilitate educational opportunity and college degree attainment for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated Californians.
