Some Maryland inmates could soon swap their orange jumpsuits for caps and gowns under a new program at one of the nation’s most prestigious universities — where tuition costs law-abiding students upward of $60,000 per year.
Georgetown University will offer a full bachelor’s degree program for Maryland inmates beginning in the next academic year, the Washington, D.C., university announced on Wednesday. The program goes beyond the Georgetown University Prisons and Justice Initiative’s existing non-degree Prison Scholars Program, which began in 2018.
“We are excited to build upon the success of the Prison Scholars Program and provide an opportunity for students to earn a college degree while incarcerated,” Prisons and Justice Initiative Director Marc Howard said. “A degree from Georgetown and the interdisciplinary coursework behind it will prepare our graduates to reenter their communities and the workforce with pride in their academic achievements.”
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The expanded program, which will be funded by a $1 million, three-year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as well as Georgetown alumnus Damien Dwin, will welcome its first cohort of 25 students at the maximum-security Patuxent Institution in Jessup, Maryland. To cover the cost of tuition, the university will be able to offer financial aid to Patuxent students as a result of its designation as a Second Chance Pell Experimental Site. The cost of tuition at Georgetown for full-time undergraduate students during the 2020-21 academic year was $28,692 per semester.
Georgetown President John DeGioia said that expanding the Prison Scholars Program is in accordance with the university’s religious roots.
“As a university, we have a responsibility to advance the common good and empower the members of our community to share in this important work,” DeGioia said. “As a Catholic and Jesuit institution, this commitment has been a long-standing element of Georgetown’s mission, and I’m grateful that this expansion of the Prison Scholars Program will ensure that future leaders who are currently incarcerated will be able to access the Georgetown academic experience as members of our community.”
The Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, which signed a memorandum of understanding with Georgetown on March 17 authorizing the new degree program, also celebrated the news.
“We welcome the opportunity to offer higher education from a prestigious university within our corrections system,” said Robert Green, the department’s secretary. “The Prison Scholars Program opens doors from incarceration to employment and will help its students contribute positively to their communities post-release.”
Several localities throughout the nation have taken steps toward criminal justice reform in recent months. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed House Bill 3653, which is meant to reshape criminal justice and policing, into law in Illinois, and several states, including New York, legalized the recreational use of marijuana while expunging some current and past marijuana possession convictions, a major victory for criminal justice activists.
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The United States’s criminal justice system holds almost 2.3 million people in 1,833 state prisons, 110 federal prisons, 1,772 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,134 local jails, 218 immigration detention facilities, and 80 Indian Country jails, as well as in military prisons, civil commitment centers, state psychiatric hospitals, and prisons in the U.S. territories, according to the Prison Policy Initiative, a nonprofit, nonpartisan initiative advocating against mass incarceration.
Georgetown says it created the Prison Justice Initiative in 2016 to address this “national crisis of mass incarceration.”
