There’s something about a correctional facility that deflates the imagination. The buildings are concrete, the light is bad, and time slows down. The future shrinks into a series of procedural loops, meals, headcounts, lockdowns. Policy debates happen out there, but for the people inside, the stakes are lived minute by minute. Freedom becomes abstract. Dignity, a rumor. And then someone hands you a textbook.
Earlier this month, I came across a quiet piece of news that stayed with me far longer than the day’s headlines. It didn’t come with a press conference. There was no viral video. But buried inside a federal education brief and confirmed in coverage from a handful of policy outlets was something profound: More than 30,000 incarcerated Americans are now expected to receive Pell Grants to attend college classes, behind bars. This is not just a bureaucratic change. It’s a full-circle correction, nearly three decades in the making.
In 1994, the federal government eliminated Pell Grant eligibility for prisoners as part of the now-infamous crime bill. At the time, the rationale was tough-on-crime posturing. Why should taxpayers foot the bill for a college education that even law-abiding citizens struggled to afford? The moral calculus was clear, and, it turns out, profoundly shortsighted.
Because here’s what we’ve learned in the decades since: Nothing rehabilitates quite like education. Prison education programs reduce recidivism by nearly 50 percent. They increase post-release employment rates by 12 percent. And they provide the most intangible yet essential thing of all, a sense that tomorrow can be better than today.
For years, a handful of experimental programs, Bard Prison Initiative in New York, Northwestern University’s program in Illinois, and community colleges like Ivy Tech in Indiana, kept the flame alive. They taught sociology and statistics, literature and logistics. And in doing so, they taught something else, too: that the human mind, even in confinement, can still reach for something larger.
In 2023, that flame caught wind. The FAFSA Simplification Act restored Pell Grant access to incarcerated students, ending a 29-year prohibition. Now, in 2025, we’re beginning to see the fruits of that policy shift. Over $130 million in aid will support a growing wave of prison-based college programs. More than 30,000 students are expected to benefit. Across 50 states, hundreds of institutions are building classrooms where there used to be dead ends. There’s something profoundly American about that.
Because we are, at heart, a nation built on the idea of reinvention. That a person is not the worst thing they’ve ever done. That education is not the prize at the end of the road, it’s the road itself.
When I think about hope, I don’t think about slogans. I think about a student, formerly anonymous, often dismissed, flipping through the pages of The Souls of Black Folk or working through the second chapter of Algebra I under the hum of fluorescent lights. I think about the professor who drives two hours each way to teach rhetoric inside a maximum-security facility because, in his words, “it’s the most serious classroom I’ve ever been in.”
That’s the thing about hope. It doesn’t always arrive loudly. Sometimes it walks in with a backpack, sits down at a steel desk, and listens.
We have a long way to go. But this, this is the kind of long bet that civil societies make when they believe in people, not just punishment. And for the first time in a long time, we’re acting like a society that remembers how to build futures, even in the most unlikely places.