Some notes on prisoner education and the anthropology of reentry: a report from the field

In 1994, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, H.R. 3355, Pub.L. 103–322 was signed into law by US President Bill Clinton. The largest and most comprehensive crime bill in the history of the USA, it provided for 100,000 new police officers, $9.7 billion in funding for new prisons, a greatly expanded federal death penalty and the overturning of Lyndon Johnson’s Higher Education Act of 1965 statute that allowed prisoners to qualify for federal Pell Grants1 for post-secondary education while inside (Kramer and Michalowski 1995). The Clinton Crime bill, as it came to be known, stated that “No basic grant shall be awarded… to any individual who is incarcerated in any Federal or State penal institution,” thus effectively shutting most prisoners out of post-secondary education and precipitating a steady decline in enrollments and a radical shuttering of prison education programs over the subsequent decade. More recently, there has been a countervailing return towards the idea that “they all come back” as reentry scholar and advocate Jeremy Travis (2005) put it in his landmark report. This has led to a renewed interest in post-secondary education in prison. In 2015, several members of the House of Representatives introduced the Restoring Education and Learning Act (REAL Act) and, in 2016, the Obama administration agreed to support a program at the Department of Education permitting prisoners to receive government funding for post-secondary education through a provision of the Higher Education Act that allows for experimental sites on a pilot basis to test out a new concept.