Prison Education

I am writing a book called The Carceral Tower: Prison Education in the Age of Mass Incarceration, which builds upon my dissertation research. I argue that prison education fails to be as effective as imagined because incarcerated students have their career aspirations and agency constrained and are afforded few legal protections and opportunities in the labor market after prison. I build this argument using a combination of survey data, budgets, legislative and agency documents, qualitative interviews with 50 formerly incarcerated men, and an experimental audit study of 1,500 employers in five states. I demonstrate how constrained agency and inadequate legal protections and opportunities converge to undermine the rehabilitative and educational efforts of returning citizens. In addition to the costs to returning citizens, The Carceral Tower highlights how this policy failure costs us all. 

the Cornell Prison Education Program in evolving its incarcerated learner database into a sharable digital tool, while developing models for using this open-source software to improve learner outcomes.

12/2022 - 12/2024