Marquette University recently received over a million dollars from the Mellon Foundation to further energize and grow its prison education program.
The program is headed by two organizations housed within Marquette’s Center for Urban Research, Teaching, & Outreach (CURTO). The first, the Educational Preparedness Program (EPP), offers courses, academic support, and career-building resources to currently and formerly incarcerated (CFI) students.
The program makes available “blended courses” that bring CFI students and Marquette undergrads into the same classrooms. The courses span various fields – including criminology, social welfare and justice, and history – and touch on topics such as mass incarceration, surveillance, poetry, and the psychology of adolescent development.
The courses are offered at several sites: the Milwaukee County Community Reintegration Center, the Racine Youthful Offender Correctional Facility, the Racine Correctional Institution, and Marquette’s own campus, said Dr. Darren Wheelock, director of criminal justice data analytics at Marquette.
One course, Invisible Sentence, looks at how the incarceration of parents can impact the lives of the children left behind, as well as the policies and practices that can help these children. The course primarily focuses on how this phenomenon affects marginalized communities.
CFI students can take up to four blended courses for free, for which they earn college credit, while learning to acclimate to college settings, perhaps for the first time, according to Wheelock.
And when they decide they want to continue their education by pursuing a degree, they turn to the second organization under CURTO involved in this effort, the McNeely Prison Education Consortium (MPEC).
