Welcome to the Justice Education Center at the Claremont Colleges

The Justice Education Center at the Claremont Colleges provides transformative educational pathways, policy advocacy, and reintegration support for incarcerated, formerly incarcerated, and non-incarcerated students. Through the Inside-Out model, interdisciplinary curriculum, arts/humanities programming, and community partnerships, the Center challenges racial injustice, reduces recidivism, increases awareness of mass incarceration’s impacts, and promotes human dignity across all backgrounds. The Center cultivates ethical growth while creating replicable models for higher education in prisons and reintegrating formerly incarcerated individuals into society.

Initially inaugurated in 2018 as the Justice Education Initiative JEI, we have evolved into the Justice Education Center. Developed from over 25 years of innovative work in prison education, a trailblazing model was created that introduced the first in-prison bachelor’s degree pathway in the United States based on the inside-out model. Our commitment to expanding educational opportunities extends from within prison walls to the broader community, engaging faculty, students, and community members in meaningful dialogues about mass incarceration’s profound personal and societal impacts. Supported by two generous $1.1 million grants from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to Pitzer College, the Center orchestrates a collaborative network of justice education programs among the Claremont Colleges, regional carceral institutions, and local community organizations.

Higher education yields the most dramatically sustained recidivism decreases of any systematically implemented carceral programming. According to statistics published by the U.S. Department of Justice in 2014, approximately three of every four people (76.6%) released from prison are rearrested within five years of release. But for those who participate in prison GED and high school programs, the odds of recidivating plummet to 43%, and even further to 13.7% for those who earn their associate’s degrees while incarcerated. For those who earn their bachelor’s degrees, recidivism drops to 5.6%, and for those who earn their master’s degrees, the rate of rearrest is 0%. Our commitment to expanding access to these vital rehabilitative programs resulted in the December 2020 launch of the country’s first in-prison bachelor’s degree pathway for currently incarcerated students based on a unique “Inside-Out” education model. These dynamic courses bring equal numbers of incarcerated “inside” students and campus-based “outside” students together in carceral settings and have proven to be as mutually transformative as they are engaging.

Through interdisciplinary courses ranging in topic from number theory to US immigration policy to emotional development, the Justice Education Center strives to creatively harness and augment the well-established rehabilitative potential of education for those who are incarcerated and to forge new theoretical and pragmatic pathways for restorative responses to one of the most urgent social dilemmas of the contemporary era.

Justice Education Center:   6C Students