In a welcome move, Governor Terry McAuliffe is making Virginia the only state to offer state prisoners college credit for five career and technical education courses recommended by ACE CREDIT – the American Council on Education’s College Credit Recommendation Service. Founded in 1918, ACE is the major coordinating body for all of the nation’s higher
As the school-to-prison pipeline system continues to be under scrutiny, schools in the Los Angeles area are working to reduce this, armed with mounting evidence that harsh punishment for small offenses at an early age does not reduce crime rates, but makes it more likely that offenders to go to prison than to college. Realizing
The U.S. Supreme Court has handed down a per curiam (“by the court”) order reversing the murder conviction 14 years earlier of a Louisiana death-row inmate. In the fairly unusual per curiam procedure, the Justices decided the case based only on briefs filed by both sides on whether the case should be heard and the
A proposed ballot measure launched by Calif. Gov. Edmund G. ‘Jerry’ Brown to amend so-called ‘determinate’ sentencing rules would need to gather nearly 600,000 valid signatures from state voters to reach the November ballot. Brown’s proposed ballot initiative, introduced in late January, would let the state’s voters decide on a package of proposed criminal law and
The concept of providing a college education to American prisoners is nothing new. As early as 1953, a few select prisons permitted such educational programming. But it wasn’t until 1965, and Title IV of the Higher Education Act, that prisoners were permitted to obtain the funding of Pell Grants for their college studies. It was
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Petersburg, Virginia — A new book by prison rights advocate Christopher Zoukis is making headlines as a growing number of North Americans – including leading U.S. presidential election candidates and governors of several states – are acknowledging education is the only way to fix the broken penal system. Released on March 1,
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) is continuing his call for college courses to be offered to inmates in New York prisons. Part of the governor’s ‘Right Priorities’ criminal justice initiatives, the proposal for college classes for inmates resembles a plan Cuomo proposed in 2014, only to abandon six weeks later in the face of
If you remember the summer of 2001, you’ll recall the name Chandra Levy. She was a 24-year-old graduate student and Federal Bureau of Prisons intern who disappeared on May 1 as she was getting ready to leave Washington, D.C., and return to her family’s home in California. The reason her disappearance flooded the airwaves and
The past several years have seen a growing awareness among Americans that our criminal justice policies are flawed and need to be reformed. The premise has included the system being harsher on minorities than non-minorities, too severe on non-violent drug offenders, and just plain old inefficient and ineffective. All of this appears to be true,
In a February 16 speech delivered in the Harlem section of northern Manhattan, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton proposed a $2 billion plan to address what she described as a national problem of too many African-American students being diverted into the criminal justice system. Speaking in the auditorium of the Schomburg Center for Research in