The University of Wyoming’s (UW) prison education program could soon expand to the state’s highest security prison, and eventually to all five state correctional facilities.
Pathways from Prison, which began offering one-off memoir-writing and other classes in 2015, will graduate its first cohort of incarcerated students, six women from the Women’s Center in Lusk, this summer.
If they cross that finish line, they will have earned General Studies bachelor’s degrees. That’s an achievement they have been pursuing since 2022 when they embarked on the four-year degree.
Rob Colter, head of UW’s philosophy department and director of the Pathways program, said educating prisoners benefits all of Wyoming since most of its residents who are behind bars today will be released at some point in the future.
“Do we want them to come out better than when they went in — more educated, more capable of thinking their way through things, more capable of getting a job — or do we want them to come out just like they were, or even worse?” Colter said. “For most of us, we want them to come out better, because they’re going to be, if not our neighbors, somebody’s neighbor. And we want them to be as good as citizens as they can be.”
Colter said a $500,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation, announced earlier this month, will grow the program by funding both a public humanities doctoral student and undergraduate intern, better compensating the UW instructors who have often volunteered time or taken on extra work to run the virtual classes, and set up some of this year’s and next year’s program graduates to serve as peer mentors to their fellow prisoners.
But perhaps the most significant development will be expanding into the State Penitentiary in Rawlins, where the program has yet to tread.
Wyoming maintains five facilities, which together house more than 2,000 inmates, according to the state Department of Corrections’ most recent report. The facilities include:
- The Wyoming State Penitentiary in Rawlins, with a current population of 567;
- The Wyoming Medium Correctional Institution in Torrington, with a current population of 683;
- The Wyoming Women’s Center in Lusk, with a current population of 217;
- The Wyoming Honor Conservation Camp in Newcastle, with a current population of 291;
- The Wyoming Honor Farm in Riverton, with a current population of 299.
Pathways is on track to graduate the next cohort, men from Torrington’s Medium Correctional Institution, next summer.
With the Mellon grant, Colter said the program will soon reach incarcerated Wyomingites in Rawlins as well.
“Rawlins is going to be entirely online, probably mostly asynchronous, because of some of the security requirements [and] also the fact that it's an older facility, and it’s got more infrastructure issues, so sometimes technology is less reliable there,” Colter said. “Also because of the security level, there are potentially students who maybe can’t be in the same space together for whatever reason. So, it’s going to raise some extra challenges there.”
But those challenges are worth overcoming, he added.
“These are human beings, and I think education is a fundamental right, and they should have access to it,” Colter said. “On a more practical and fiscal level, it turns out it’s got incredible bang for the buck as far as its impact on recidivism.”
Most prisoners released in the United States will be arrested and incarcerated again, but a 2014 meta-analysis of the available research showed prisoners who receive college education behind bars are up to 43% less likely than their peers to wind up back in prison. The same analysis found that research consistently showed educated prisoners had better post-incarceration employment rates as well.
A 2023 meta-analysis of 79 papers conducted by researchers from Middle Tennessee State University again found education behind bars, including college education, reduced recidivism and improved economic outcomes for both prisoners and their communities.
Colter said he’s looking “down the road” to try expanding Pathways to the last two prisons in Wyoming, Riverton’s honor farm and Newcastle’s honor conservation camp.
“Generally people are there for a short term, so we probably won’t have a degree program there, but we’re hoping to have some classes,” he said.
The Mellon Foundation has supported other projects in Wyoming, including the establishment of the Mineta-Simpson Institute at Heart Mountain.
