Misrepresenting Prison Education Risks Harming Students

To the editor:

We write from a Big 10 Prison Education Program, where we’ve worked for a decade to increase access to higher education for incarcerated individuals. We found the framing of the article,“Prison Education May Raise Risk of Reincarceration for Technical Violations” (Jan. 12, 2026) to be misleading and have deep concerns for its potential impact on incarcerated students and prison education programming.

The article fails to acknowledge decades of evidence about the benefits of prison education. The title and framing deceptively imply that college programs increase criminal activity post-release at a national scale. The Grinnell study—an unpublished working paper—is only informed by data collected in Iowa. Of most impact to incarcerated students, the title and introductory paragraphs mislead the reader by implying that the blame for technical violations and reincarceration should be placed on the justice-impacted individuals themselves. Buried in the article is a nuanced, accurate, structural interpretation of the data: per Iowa-based data, incarcerated individuals who pursue college may be unfairly targeted by parole boards and other decision-making bodies in the corrections system, thus leading to a higher rate of technical violations.

The impact of the article’s misleading framing could be devastating for incarcerated college students, especially in a climate where legislators often value being “tough on crime.”

We understand the importance for journalism to tell the full story, and many of the Grinnell study’s findings may be useful for understanding programmatic challenges; however, this particular framing could lead to its own unintended consequences. The 1994 repeal of Pell funding collapsed prison education for nearly thirty years; as a result, the US went from having 772 Prison Ed Programs to eight. Blaming incarcerated individuals for a structural failure could cause colleges and universities to pull support from their programs. We’ve already seen programs (e.g.,Georgia State University) collapse without institutional support, leaving incarcerated students without any access to college. This material threat is further amplified by the article’s premature conclusions about a field that has only recently—as of 2022 with the reintegration of Pell—begun to rebuild.

In a world where incarcerated students are denied their humanity on a daily basis, it is our collective societal obligation to responsibly and fairly represent information about humanizing programming. Otherwise, we risk harming students’ still emerging—and still fragile—access to higher education.