The oldest prison in Texas is placed squarely in the middle of downtown Huntsville. Nothing much has changed in the last 40 years. Same bright red brick, same wide barred windows and the same small blond-haired woman working for the community college inside the jailhouse.
 
Yet, in the same building, with the same halls with the same woman, every day is different. 

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“You have to pivot a lot and adjust, and you have to be flexible. I've been working in this program 37 years, and (then) you think you've seen it all, but you haven't,” said Donna Zuniga, the associate vice president of Lee College Huntsville Center. “Every day, it could be a different day, a different incident, a different situation that you may not have faced in the past and you have to be able to pivot, adjust.”

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Incarcerated students have access to Pell Grant funds once again after the federal government reinstated eligibility last year, after almost 30 years. To make use of the new opportunities, educational institutions are working to clear obstacles to resources and connect imprisoned students to the internet, an expensive endeavor requiring thousands of devices and millions of dollars.

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Education programs in Texas prisons have shown to decrease recidivism, or the rate of return for people from the justice system. As of 2023, only 13% of students and alumni from Lee College, one of the state’s first institutions to provide college courses in prisons, re-entered the justice system.

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QUALIFYING

The Department of Education launched a pilot program for colleges to begin processing Pell Grants for incarcerated students called the Second Chance Pell Experimental Sites Initiative in 2015. The pilot included 68 colleges and universities across 27 different states. Five years later, the pilot was expanded before Congress reestablished Pell Grant eligibility to all incarcerated students for the first time since 1994. 

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“This was kind of coming at a time when colleges were looking at an enrollment cliff (with) just shrinking US population, a shrinking group of the more traditional college-age folks,” said Ruth Delaney, initiative director for Unlocking Potential at the Vera Institute of Justice. “Colleges have been really motivated to find new groups of students that they might be able to engage in college.”

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During the pilot program, Vera, an organization dedicated to ending mass incarceration, lobbied Congress for the complete reinstatement of Pell Grant eligibility. Then-president Donald Trump signed it into law.

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Since the reinstatement, more Texas institutions are engaging with Windham School District, the agency managing education in the justice system, to begin offering classes at more prisons, said the district’s superintendent Kristina Hartman.

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“Colleges and universities are aware that this opportunity exists, and they are starting to engage with us to see what they need to do to operate,” Hartman said. “We're doing tours with colleges on facilities. We're talking through the programs that they're able to offer and programs that we'd like to see them offer. We're really in the planning stages there of opening this opportunity.”

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However, the process to take Pell Grants involves numerous applications and multiple agency approvals. Although colleges and universities could start applying since last year, no institution in the Windham School District has made it past the final stages. 

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Lee College has been part of the pilot program since 2017, but the transition to the permanent initiative is complicated. Colleges must apply with various advisory committees and get accredited to teach college-credited or professional programs before their applications eventually end up on the desk of the U.S. Department of Education.  

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“It's offered opportunities for individuals that would never have been able to go to college because there's just not enough money,” Zuniga said. “They don't have funds for college education and those types of things, nor do their families.” 

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ACCESS TO MATERIALS

Access to technology is vital for incarcerated students to succeed and an important part of reassimilation for people leaving the justice system, Zuniga said. Job applications and resources are mostly online now and many people within the correctional system may not have ever owned a cell phone. 

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“One of the biggest problems when an individual leaves a prison, and if they've been there, two, three years, even some longer, they have no concept of the technology out in the free world,” Zuniga said.

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The criminal justice department allows some inmates access to a tablet, which includes educational, religious and legal content as well as games and music applications. The tablets also include access to the Gutenberg Library App, a free source of books in the public domain or without copyright. 

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Although the prisons do allow incarcerated individuals access to books through the Gutenberg app, the information can be outdated, said Scott Odierno, a coordinator for the Austin-based non-profit Inside Books. 

Inside Books donates books, workbooks and textbooks to people in Texas’ prison system. Odierno said the non-profit fulfills requests for general education development books, textbooks and required readings for classes on top of fiction thrillers and comic books. The organization recently fulfilled a request for 500 commercial driver’s license textbooks though a $10,000 grant. 

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“A lot of people want books on math and science, a lot of people want business books and computer literacy,” Odierno said. “However, like in the last couple years, they've been banning a lot of computer books (or) anything to do with programming and coding. So we're trying to figure out ways to get around that.” 

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According to data from The Marshall Project, a non-profit working in justice advocacy, over 50 books on computing and software are banned in Texas prisons for “security concerns” as of 2022. Odierno said the non-profit and ones similar to Inside Books were also dealing with issues with books getting denied before entering the units. 

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The criminal justice department said in a statement as the agency switched to a digital mailing system, many non-profit organizations’ packages were denied but the issue was “immediately resolved.” 

“(The department) switched to the digital mail program to combat contraband such as paper soaked in K2 and methamphetamines entering our facilities through traditional mail,” director of communications Amanda Hernadez said in an email. “The original discrepancy was that units were denying books not sent from a publisher or bookstore, regardless if it was from a nonprofit organization or family member.”

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Working to get internet access in classrooms across facilities also poses a challenge. Lee College is talking with internet providers and the department to get more resources and technologies into its classes. The department is on board with this initiative and a similar one from Windham School District, but implementation is slow as funding, infrastructure issues and staff shortages delay further progress. 

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“We do have some programs that simulate the internet to kind of get (students) used to how to maneuver, how to do searches, so they're not going out just totally blind,” Zuniga said. “But we need far more resources. We need internet access, which they can access safely…We're very hopeful that we're moving in that direction.”

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Many prisons are in rural areas, made of concrete and surrounded by high fences. Additionally, the justice department still needs to maintain its main goal of public safety, so actual access to the internet is limited as providers need to modify its security settings to suit the department’s needs.

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The Windham School district recently applied for a $12 million federal grant to connect all 100 of its campuses across the state. If approved, the rollout would include connecting about 30 campuses a year for four years. Hartman said the grant would fund internet service providers, student laptops and educational management systems like Blackboard or Canvas. Windham School District also emphasized to state lawmakers that there is a need for more sustainable funding. Internet access would make Windham’s programs more competitive to other community colleges in the state. 

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“Our principals will engage with legislators in their district areas and provide an overview of the district and of the district needs,” Hartman said. “Then our chief financial officer and I and our director of instruction will make appointments with individual offices and talk with them. We'll brief them on the funding opportunity that we have, draw some comparisons between community-based programs and Windham programs.”

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WHERE DO TO GO FROM HERE

In September, the Sunset Advisory Commission, a legislative body working with state agencies to ensure efficiency, recommended higher education programs move back into Windham School District’s jurisdiction after a decade under the state’s Department of Criminal Justice. In the staff report for the 89th state legislature, the commission also recommended legislators to require the Texas Department of Criminal Justice to plan with Windham School District on its rehabilitation and reentry programs.

 

“Some of the benefits are that as educators, we understand the language and understand the needs of the colleges. We have staff dedicated to career pathways and students progressing to post secondary education,” Hartman said. “It's really a natural progression and a natural occurrence that those who are educators would manage the contracts of education entities.”

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Additionally the committee recommended other rehabilitation entities, such as the Board of Pardon and Paroles, coordinate to have a more cohesive plan for the inmates within reentry programs. 

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Hartman said she believes there will be positive outcomes for higher education in Texas prisons in the 89th legislative session. Lawmakers appear to be supportive of college programs and the Texas Department of Criminal Justice is also on board, Hartman said. 

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For Zuniga, she said she believes more funding for Lee College and its programs would ultimately lead to better student outcomes. Like other institutions, the quality of programming is determined by the money backing it up, she said.

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Her students and alumni, Zuniga said, keep her working to improve inmates’ access to education.

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“It's very important, because this may be the last chance many of these individuals that we work with inside the penitentiary have a real opportunity to spend the time getting training or getting a degree,” Zuniga said. “Because once they come out, it's a fight.” 

 

AUTHOR'S NOTE: The reporting process for this story included hours of interviews with Lee College, Windham School district and non-profit organizations. Additionally, dozens of emails were exchanged between the Texas Department of Criminal Justice and myself. The same goes for multiple politicians working to evaluate the higher education system in the justice department . I sat through legislative board meetings and read through reports. This story was part of a class assignment, where I received advice and mentorship from my professor and other classmates. I later self-published it on my digital portfolio.