UO’s Prison Education Program wins Mellon grant

The University of Oregon’s Prison Education Program, directed by Shaul Cohen, received a $481,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation to increase its educational programming in prisons around the state. The award will build on the work the Prison Education Program has done since 2007 to serve incarcerated Oregonians and to offer UO students an opportunity to take classes in a range of subjects and to learn with and from their incarcerated classmates.

The award will fund three separate initiatives that will help increase access to higher education courses, lectures, and materials in facilities across Oregon. 

The Prison Education Program will be able to train additional faculty members from the humanities to offer their classes in prisons, which enables the program to offer more courses and a greater depth of subject matter inside prison walls. 

The funding will also allow the Prison Education Program to broadcast more UO programming on televisions throughout all 14 prisons in Oregon. The program has been airing Oregon Humanities Center’s UO Today show and lectures since 2019.

In addition to the OHC, the program partners with the Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics and the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art to give incarcerated Oregonians access to community programs that are recorded on campus. The award will also allow the program to hire a former inside student, who earned a bachelor’s degree through the UO while incarcerated, to manage Prison Education Program TV.

The third component of the Mellon award is a pilot program that will offer educational materials to incarcerated individuals in isolated settings within the prisons, including solitary confinement and mental health units. 

The Prison Education Program grew out of the UO’s Inside-Out Program, started in 2007 by former OHC Director Steven Shankman, which offered credit courses that included a mix of UO students and incarcerated students. Hundreds of UO students and more than 1,000 incarcerated students have gone through the program since its inception. The UO program has grown to be one of the largest in the nation.

This story was excerpted from Around the O.