Justice Education Initiative Partners

Community Organization Partners

Crossroads, Inc.
For over 45 years, Crossroads, Inc. has provided housing, education, counseling, employment training, and other vital forms of support to formerly incarcerated women after their release. Their mission is not only to cultivate new skills, but to build resilient communities as some of the best defenses against recidivism.

Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program
The Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program was founded in 1997 by Professor Lori Pompa at Temple University, and has since grown into an international organization that works with over 100 institutions of higher learning. Inside-Out courses bring campus-based and incarcerated students together for semester-long courses held in carceral facilities: fostering crucial dialogue and profound personal and collective intellectual growth.

Insight Garden Program
The Insight Garden Program (IGP) transforms prisoners’ lives through creating a connection to nature. IGP facilitates an innovative curriculum combined with vocational gardening and landscaping training so that people in prison can reconnect to self, community, and the natural world. This “inner” and “outer” gardening approach transforms lives, ends ongoing cycles of incarceration, and creates safer communities.  The Claremont College’s Justice Education Initiative will partner with this program at the California Institution for Women beginning fall 2019.

Prison Education Project
Founded by Cal Poly Pomona Professor Renford Reese, the Prison Education Project (PEP) expands educational opportunities for inmates in 17 California correctional facilities. With the assistance of over 3,000 university student and faculty volunteers, PEP has worked with approximately 8,000 inmates in these facilities since 2011. PEP is the largest volunteer-based prison education program of its kind in the United States.

Prototypes Women’s Center Pomona
Prototypes Center for Innovation in Health, Mental Health, and Social Services is a non-profit agency founded in 1986 that supports women and their families through issues like domestic violence, homelessness, substance abuse, and HIV/AIDS. They also house the Community Prisoner Mother Program, which provides a safe and stable environment for mothers who are pregnant or have children under the age of six to serve their sentences at Prototypes.

The Reintegration Academy
Founded in 2009, the Reintegration Academy is a partner of the Prison Education Project and Project Rebound at Cal Poly Pomona, which brings people on parole to a college campus for 8 weeks and immerses them in academic, life skills, and career development training. In the 6th week of the program, each participant is enrolled in a local community college, and in the 8th week, RA hosts a job fair: inviting local employers to meet and interview program participants. Theirs is a pioneering re-entry program, and the subject of the Los Angeles Film Awards’ award-winning documentary “LA: A Lifer Cohort.”

Starting Over, Inc.
Starting Over, Inc. specializes in providing transitional housing and reentry services while helping to build strong communities through recovery, civic engagement, and leadership development. Their clientele include formerly incarcerated folks, survivors of domestic violence, and folks recovering from substance use disorders. Through various forms of education, peer support, and civic engagement, they effectively combat recidivism and homelessness in LA and the Inland Empire.

Collegiate Partners and The Claremont Colleges Consortium

Norco College
Norco College is a community college that prepares students to transfer to four-year universities or to enter the workforce fully prepared for their chosen career.  The Claremont Colleges’ Justice Education Initiative partners with Norco College at the California Rehabilitation Center to provide higher education opportunities.

Office of Consortial Academic Collaboration
The Justice Education Initiative is one of the first major projects coordinated by the Office of Consortial Academic Collaboration (OCAC). Founded in 2017 by the presidents of The Claremont Colleges, the OCAC provides ongoing support for joint academic priorities across the colleges.

Pitzer College Community Engagement Center
Pitzer College’s Community Engagement Center (CEC) supports faculty, students, staff and partner organizations advancing social responsibility and community engagement through research, service, advocacy and action.

Racial Justice Initiative at Pitzer College
Continuing acts of racialized violence and the mobilization efforts by the Black Lives Matter movement and its allies to fight for racial justice provide an important backdrop for scholars and students to analyze this unique moment in time. In an effort to support productive discussion, analysis and activism, President Melvin Oliver’s Racial Justice Initiative provides funds for three primary prongs: curricular transformation, co-curricular transformation, and structural transformation. Together, these are designed to deepen student, staff, and faculty knowledge and action around racialized violence.

Carceral Partners

California Rehabilitation Center (CRC)
The California Rehabilitation Center is a medium level II correctional facility in Norco, CA. Led by Warden Cynthia Y. Tampkins, the CRC has credit-bearing Inside-Out Prison Exchange courses taught by Claremont Colleges professors since 2014.  We will begin a Bachelor’s degree pathway at this facility beginning fall 2020.

California Institution for Women (CIW)
The Claremont Colleges have participated in co-curricular activities at CIW for over two decades. Justice Education Initiative is working with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and the California Institution for Women to establish an Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program.  We hope to begin offering credit-bearing Inside-Out courses spring 2020.

Camp Afflerbaugh-Paige
Camp Afflerbaugh-Paige (Camp AP) is a Los Angeles County juvenile probation camp located in La Verne, CA, that houses male wards ages 13-18 for sentences of 6-18 months. The wards attend Camp AP high school. Pitzer established a partnership with Camp AP in 2001, and Pitzer students work in the high school classrooms designing or facilitating educational programs.

Prototypes Women’s Center Pomona (Community Prisoner Mother Program)
The Justice Education Initiative is working with the Community Prisoner Mother Program at Prototypes to create an Inside/Out Prison Exchange Program.  The goal of the CPMP program is to provide a safe, stable, and stimulating environment for women currently serving prison time.  This program allows mothers who are pregnant or who have children under the age of 6 to serve their sentence at Prototypes.

Vista Del Rio Adult School (California Rehabilitation Center)
VDRAS “provides incarcerated people with a wide-range of opportunities, including access to college courses, basic literacy instruction and career skill development,” and was named a “Distinguished School” by CDCR in January 2021: only the second of two programs yet awarded that distinction in the US. Vista Del Rio enrolls over 1,500 students who are able to take adult basic education, obtain a GED or high school diploma, and move on to college-level courses. VDRAS also offers Career Technical Education, computer technology courses, physical education classes, and library services.