The report’s recommendations come just as federal Pell Grants are about to open up to more people who are in prison.
Pell Grants, created to help low-income students pay for college, have been broadly unavailable to incarcerated people under a 1994 law. From 1972 to 1994, federal and state funds supported a majority of the roughly 772 higher education programs in prisons, according to the Bard Prison Initiative at Bard College. But after passage of the 1994 Crime Bill, many state lawmakers also pulled funds from postsecondary programs, essentially collapsing the prison education system.
