Before Congress decided to end prisoners’ eligibility for Pell grants in 1994, a reform enacted under President Clinton’s 1994 omnibus crime bill, several states led national efforts to provide educational opportunities for inmates in their states.

When Congress decided to stop extending Pell grant eligibility to prisoners, despite the fact that a Government Accountability Office report at the time showed there was no impact on other needy students’ ability to receive aid by maintaining prison Pell, several institutions in many states worked privately to continue to extend these opportunities to students in their states.

Rutgers University, New Jersey’s public system that includes 30 campuses, and Raritan Valley Community College, in Branchburg Township, were among them, and are the only two institutions in the state approved.

Even before President Obama announced a pilot program to bring back prison Pell beginning in the 2016-17 school year — with Rutgers and Raritan Valley co-authorized as a pilot site serving seven correctional facilities across the state — the institutions had been working to provide educational associations to incarcerated individuals, with particular efforts toward reintegrating them back onto the campuses upon their release.

Obama’s Second Chance Pell program was enacted as an executive action under the experimental sites provision of the Higher Education Act in 2015, targeting approximately 12,000 inmates at over 100 federal and state penal institutions across the country who are within three and five years of release. The partnering institutions offer classroom-based instruction at the prisons — in the case of Rutgers and Raritan Valley, New Jersey inmates can earn either an associate of arts degree for transfer, or a bachelor of arts in criminal justice. Raritan Valley offers the associate degree, Rutgers the bachelors, and the entire program is administered under the umbrella of the NJ-Step program, which is the latest iteration of a consortium agreement around prison education in New Jersey. NJ-Step is housed at Rutgers and serves as a liaison organization between the community college, university system and the prison system.

Sheila Meiman, director of prison education at Raritan Valley, emphasized that the state's department of corrections is an equal partner in the arrangement, which she said would not be successful without their full buy-in and voice. Most people don't know, she said, that prisons have fully operational high schools inside, and it's often these high schools that serve as feeders for NJ-Step and other similar programs. The Department of Corrections has authorized holding graduation ceremonies on the same day, so that the high school graduates have the opportunity to sit with peers who have earned an associate degree and gain motivation to continue their educations.

"We’re not just in there teaching good information to people, we’re providing an education" by way of credit-bearing courses and degree pathways, Meiman said