Still, even under the best circumstances, incarcerated students are broadly kept away from much of the human knowledge housed online. Unlike in K-12 schools, where filters are designed to restrict student access to dangerous or inappropriate websites and otherwise let students browse freely — a blacklist approach — prisons operate with whitelists: facilities identify specific sites users can access and the rest of the internet is blocked.
Both methods keep students from more websites than necessary to maintain order and safety. In K-12 schools, The Markup, now a part of CalMatters, found high schools kept students from sex education websites, LGBTQ resources, Wikipedia and a wide range of other websites they sought out while doing homework. In prisons, Delaney said, the whitelist approach leads to “a very closed down version of the internet.”
For students who are incarcerated, the limitations co-opt their educational opportunity. Carlson finished her bachelor’s degree this spring but worries the credential won’t get her as far as she’d like.
“When I go into the career world when I get out and I go to apply for a job and I work next to others, I don’t want to have stunted growth because of things like this,” Carlson said.
National trends
Last year, the Vera Institute released a report about the quality, equity and scale of prison education, assessing each state’s progress across 15 metrics. Two measures of quality were technology and academic research and library access. California received a “green” on both measures, a sign that its system offered “adequate” access, but Carlson’s research experiences illustrate the limits of “adequate.”
Nationwide, the Vera Institute named technology an area to improve. Only 17 states were labeled “adequate” for providing technology that shrinks the digital divide and supports the quality of education. Just 12 hit the same mark when it comes to providing access to academic research materials and library services.
Meanwhile, in 2016, the United States signed onto a revision to the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, naming internet access a fundamental human right with ties to the right to education.
Delaney said prison administrators often fear internet access for students could lead to violence or harm either inside or outside of the prison. But she said the fear, while legitimate, appears to be overblown.
“There is a lot of evidence that people who go to college in prison are not involved in the activities you need to worry about,” Delaney said. Students only qualify for prison education programs once they have a record of good behavior and even minor infractions can get them kicked out. They take the opportunity seriously.
Joe Tragert, vice president of product strategy at EBSCOed, EBSCO’s education division, helped create a prison version of EBSCO’s database of research resources, which holds over a billion items, including academic articles and media archives that users can search. In the prisons, users can only read and download the resources once they’ve been approved, but they can conduct their own searches and request access to documents. Tragert said he hears how dedicated people are to pursuing their degrees.
“This is their ticket to either getting out and staying out or just getting through the day,” Tragert said.
Limited opportunity
Theresa Torricellas, 66, completed her bachelor’s degree in liberal studies this spring through Roy’s program at the California Institution for Women. She said EBSCO was her main research resource and while it was full of sources, she ran into dead ends trying to study conditions in Palestine last summer.
“A lot of the information that I’m interested in, it’s just not in the media,” Torricellas said at the time. “It’s very rarely covered in the media.” On the outside, she said she probably would have turned to social media for her research. On the inside, that wasn’t an option.
She also ran into problems with Wi-Fi access when she was working on her schoolwork. Wi-Fi is only available in designated common areas and the cells that happen to be close enough to pick up that signal. She lucked out for a while, but when she moved across the hall to get a cell with better sunlight, it didn’t occur to her she might be leaving her Wi-Fi access behind. She only discovered that after it was too late.
This past academic year, her routine was to go to the noisy dayroom to search EBSCO for documents she needed or log into her course software to download assignment details and then go back to her room to continue working offline. Interrupting this workflow was the limited storage space on the prison-issued laptops.
“My laptop stopped working because I had downloaded so many EBSCO articles,” Torricellas said. Another person in the prison education program said the same thing happened to her after downloading only two large PDFs, but the newer laptops distributed by the prison have more space.
As the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation rolls out newer hardware, it is also expanding student access to research resources. Besides EBSCO, students are slowly gaining access to JSTOR, another searchable research database. Students studying in prisons through nearby college programs, like Roy’s, get access to the JSTOR database through the college’s existing license, meaning it’s already paid for.
Stacy Burnett, who directs the JSTOR Access in Prison Initiative, said many prisons offer an approach like EBSCO’s, where someone has to review and approve each student request for a document. Others have expanded access with a bulk approval tool. In some cases, state prison systems have bulk-approved an entire discipline; in Colorado, officials bulk-approved everything in JSTOR.
“If it’s on there, a student can read it,” Burnett said. They can restrict access following a problem, but so far, Burnett said that hasn’t happened.
When Carlson got to prison, she was shocked by the low education levels of the women around her. She went to a rigorous high school and learned how to read, write and conduct research. Others didn’t learn any of those skills. EBSCO and JSTOR offer a way to further their education inside. But Carlson said limited access to online research just compounds the lack of education many women got in the first place.
“I feel like when it comes to education,” Carlson said, “the doors should be wide open.”