When Congress banned Pell Grants for people in state and federal prisons in 1994, I was beginning my nearly 20-year sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin, California.

I remember the day I heard the news. I was crushed, and I was not alone, not by a long stretch. Many of the women incarcerated with me at FCI Dublin were taking college courses funded by Pell Grants. I was in my first semester, and I was enrolled in sociology, English literature, and psychology. And now they were taking that away. I was barely out of the gate, and they were already sending me back to the starting line.