Local government agencies in charge of youth violated the educational and civil rights of students in Los Angeles County’s juvenile justice facilities for decades by punting responsibility and inaction, according to a report released Wednesday.

“” blames the disconnected, vast network of local and state agencies — from the board of supervisors to the local probation department to the county office of education and more — that play one role or another in managing the county’s juvenile legal system, for the disruption in the care and education of youth in one of the nation’s largest systems.

“This broken system perpetuates a harmful cycle of ‘finger-pointing,’ often between Probation and Los Angeles County Office of Education, which hinders the resolution of issues that significantly affect the education of incarcerated youth,” wrote the Education Justice Coalition, authors of the report.

The coalition includes representatives from Children’s Defense Fund-California, ACLU of Southern California, Arts for Healing and Justice Network, Disability Rights California, Youth Justice Education Clinic at Loyola Law School, and Public Counsel.

The authors listed three demands for the board of supervisors, including reducing youth incarceration by way of implementing the previously approved Youth Justice Reimagined plan, providing access to high-quality education, and adopting transparency and accountability measures.

Decades of documented rights violations

A timeline outlines repeated student rights violations, some of which have resulted in class-action lawsuits and settlements requiring the county to be monitored by the federal and state departments of justice for years at a time.

Since 2000, the timeline notes that Los Angeles County has faced:

• A civil grand jury report calling on the board of supervisors to “improve collaboration” between the probation and education departments in order to address unmet educational needs
• An investigation by the federal Department of Justice — and subsequent settlements — found significant teacher shortages, lack of consistency in daily instruction, and issues with support for students with special needs
• A class action lawsuit against the county office of education and the probation department
• An investigation by the state Department of Justice, followed by settlements, found excessive use of force and inadequate services
• Multiple findings by a state agency of L.A. County juvenile facilities being “unsuitable for the confinement of minors”

Most recently, the state attorney general has , which would mean full state ownership of the county’s juvenile halls.

The Los Angeles Board of Supervisors, the probation department, and the Office of Education did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The lasting impact of academic disruptions

Dovontray Farmer experienced the mismanaged system when he entered Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall a second time as a 10th grader. Now 24 and serving as a youth mentor with the Youth Justice Coalition, Farmer said that his time in L.A. County facilities “played a major role in not being able to get properly educated — I felt betrayed, honestly.”

Returning to school after being released was difficult, he said, because he quickly realized he was several grade levels below his classmates at his local high school.

He’d also been part of his school’s football team before his detention at Los Padrinos when he was 17, and said he tried returning to the team once released but wasn’t allowed back.

He said the disruption to his education and participation on the football team, which he saw as a positive influence, affected how he viewed his life.

“There was nothing I really could do, so I was really giving up,” he said. “Like, everything that I really cared for was already gone.”

The environment at the juvenile facilities didn’t help matters. 

Los Padrinos recently came under fire after a  published by the Los Angeles Times showed probation officers standing idle as detained youths fought. Thirty officers have been indicted on criminal charges for encouraging or organizing gladiator-style fights among youths.

Farmer said he was put through those same types of fights when he was at Los Padrinos as a teenager.

“A lot of the coverage recently has been about the recent gladiator fights in 2023, but clearly this is a very systemic issue that even when a problem is resolved in the short term, we’re uncovering that it’s really indicative of a larger systemic problem,” said Vivian Wong, an education attorney and director of the Youth Justice Education Clinic at Loyola Law School, whose recent clients have included Los Padrinos students.

Education data across several years backs Farmer’s experiences while detained.

The most recent state data available when Farmer was detained at Los Padrinos is from 2018, when 39% of students were chronically absent, less than 43% graduated, and 12% were suspended at least once.

That same year, the  was 9% for chronic absenteeism, 83.5% for graduation, and 3.5% for suspension.

Ongoing education concerns

The report’s authors note that students across several facilities have lost thousands of instructional minutes, with a “lack of transparency and concrete planning to ensure that the missed services are adequately made up for, leaving students at risk of falling further behind educationally.”

While compensatory education has typically been used to resolve instructional minutes owed, “I am not sure that’s the most realistic way to remedy the injustice that young people face, because they have endured so much abuse in these facilities,” said Wong. “It’s much more than just a loss of instruction.”

A more appropriate response to the loss of instructional time would be a consistent investment in avoiding detention and keeping young people in their communities to maintain school stability, she added.

Past attempts at reform have often been “done without community input or leadership, both in the design and in the implementation of those reforms,” Wong said.

The new report, she added, is meant to be a tool toward implementing Youth Justice Reimagined, or YJR, a model against punitive measures that was largely developed with input from community organizations to restructure the local juvenile legal system.

Three demands

, approved by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors in November 2020 to reform the local juvenile legal system, would move the county away from punitive approaches, such as detention, and toward rehabilitative support through counseling, family and vocational programming, small residential home placements, and more.

Youth detention results in “severe disconnection from and disruption to their education trajectory,” wrote the report’s authors, as they urged the board to address abysmal educational access and achievement by fully funding and implementing YJR.

The disconnect, they added, is exacerbated by delayed school enrollment when detained and upon release, the constant presence of probation officers, and turnover of educators and classmates.

These common experiences are particularly difficult for students with learning disabilities or a history of trauma, they wrote.

“After more than a decade of incremental reform, it is time for the County to truly reimagine youth justice,” wrote Supervisors Sheila Kuehl and Mark Ridley-Thomas in their November 2020  to approve YJR. “In the same way that the Board has embraced a care first, jail last approach to the criminal justice system, it is incumbent upon the Board to embrace a care first youth development approach to youth justice.”

Despite the approval, a report published in August 2024 by the state auditor found that less than half of the YJR recommendations had been implemented by mid-2024.

To address the high rates of chronic absenteeism, poor testing results and instructional minutes owed, the Education Justice Coalition’s second demand is to adapt educational opportunities “to address the unique and significant needs of the court school population.”

They listed 18 actions the county probation and education departments should work together on, including:

• Appropriate education support for students with disabilities 
• Access to A-G approved courses for every student in a juvenile facility
• Classrooms led by educators, rather than probation officers
• Appropriately credentialed and culturally competent educators
• Education access that is not disrupted due to probation staffing issues

The coalition’s third demand centered on transparency and accountability measures by providing families with access to education planning for their children and establishing work groups that include community members.

This was originally published on .

When the U.S. Department of Education announced last summer that federal Pell Grants would become available to incarcerated college students, lawmakers and state corrections agencies scrambled to adjust statutes and step up potential partnerships with universities.

But nearly a year later, colleges and agencies are recognizing the steep administrative challenge to winning approval from the U.S. Department of Education. So far, just one new program eligible for the federal financial aid grant — in California — has gotten off the ground.

“We’re going to see an impact — it’s coming. It’s been a bit slow to arrive because of this quality focus within the regulations,” said Ruth Delaney, who leads a program at the Vera Institute of Justice to help scale up college programs in correctional institutions. “What’s great is that there’s a lot of energy in colleges and corrections to start new prison education programs.”

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for ����Ӱ�� Newsletter

Pell Grants were officially restored for incarcerated students in July 2023, following a nearly 30-year federal ban that prohibited most incarcerated students from receiving the aid. The ban was one of the provisions in the sweeping signed by President Bill Clinton.

More than 750,000 incarcerated students could potentially become eligible for Pell Grants. But to qualify, they must be below the family income limits and be at a prison that offers a college program approved by the federal Department of Education.

To date, only one has been fully approved, at Pelican Bay State Prison in northern California. Students there will be eligible to receive Pell Grants starting next fall to study for a degree in communications from California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt.

Still, officials from state corrections agencies in Maryland, Michigan and Wisconsin told Stateline that since Pell dollars became available, more colleges and universities have become interested in establishing prison education programs. Since last summer, 44 state corrections agencies and the federal Bureau of Prisons have applications or other systems to approve prison education programs, according to the Vera Institute of Justice.

“There are people in prison who have been waiting 30 years for this opportunity to come back, and they are just so eager to enroll,” Delaney said in an interview. “Anything we can do to move quickly to get high-quality programs in place — that’s what we’d like to see.”

State action

The Pell Grant, awarded by the U.S. Department of Education, is provided to low-income students across the country to help cover college expenses. Most students apply online using the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA. Incarcerated students are usually required to submit paper applications because internet access is restricted. The current maximum grant is $7,395 for a full academic year.

While states pay to house incarcerated people in their prison systems, many don’t pay for higher education; prison college programs often rely on alternative funding, such as donations and state grants. Some are a part of a federal pilot program called the Second Chance Pell Experimental Sites Initiative, which has included about 40,000 incarcerated learners. Otherwise, students have to pay out of their own pockets or use scholarships and donations from nonprofits and colleges.

No matter how it’s paid for, the goal of providing college-level instruction in prisons is to make it easier for incarcerated people to reenter society once they are released and to connect them to meaningful, good-paying jobs.

“College saved my life. It was a place where I could be free. I could read, I could learn, and I could grow. It was very transformative for me, and I realized that my life wasn’t over,” said Alexa Garza, who obtained two associate degrees and a bachelor’s degree while incarcerated in Texas. Garza now works as a Texas policy analyst and higher education justice initiatives analyst for The Education Trust, an education access advocacy group.

Prison education advocates say it’s important for schools to expand the college experience in prison beyond just offering classes. That means fostering meaningful relationships between professors and students.

“I didn’t have family in the courtroom. I had professors in the courtroom,” said William Freeman, who served time in Maryland and now leads the Justice Policy Fellowship at The Education Trust. “Now, I’m a first-gen everything — college graduate, homeowner. I don’t think my parents ever made the kind of money I’m making now.”

Many state lawmakers have worked, with varying outcomes, to boost prison college programs in anticipation that Pell Grants could help more incarcerated students earn degrees.

In Washington state, for example, a set to take effect in June will allow more incarcerated learners to seek both federal and state financial aid grants to cover the costs of postsecondary education programs.

Maryland’s legislature has sent Democratic Gov. Wes Moore a that would require that the state corrections department help incarcerated students in accessing Pell Grants and set goals for participation. Moore’s office said the legislation is under consideration.

A Florida that would have allowed students to be eligible for in-state tuition even if they had been incarcerated in the state in the past year made it out of House and Senate committees but was tabled before the legislature adjourned.

And in Montana, lawmakers state corrections officials after a found that prison education and workforce programs are limited, featuring long waitlists and inequitable access between private and public facilities.

New programs and partnerships

Corrections agencies and colleges in several states have recently announced new partnerships, with some soon to become Pell-eligible.

Maryland’s corrections department recently with the University System of Maryland to provide incarcerated students with the opportunity to obtain bachelor’s degrees or credit-based certificates from any of the 12 system universities. The university system will also be able to accept Pell Grants.

Danielle Cox, the state corrections department’s education director, said she aims to have a college or university program at every state facility by 2027.

In Utah, female incarcerated students at the Utah State Correctional Facility can apply to a new bachelor’s program at the University of Utah through the school’s Prison Education Project. At least 11 of 15 prospective students already have received their admissions decisions, according to Erin Castro, an associate professor of higher education at the University of Utah and co-founder of the Prison Education Project.

“This is the first time that the flagship public institution is admitting a currently incarcerated cohort,” Castro said.

The Nebraska Department of Correctional Services and Southeast Community College are to offer more higher education opportunities to students in five state facilities. The college enrolled 229 students this spring semester, and also is working on gaining the federal approval to offer Pell Grants as an official prison education program.

The college now offers an associate of arts degree in academic transfer, and in the fall will offer an associate of applied science in business and more career and technical education programs.

Bureaucratic barriers

But navigating the new application process from the U.S. Department of Education has required significantly more administrative labor, some advocates say.

At least one university so far has decided to pull the plug on its prison education program. Georgia State University cited the feds’ new rules for Pell Grants and a $24 million budget cut as reasons to this summer, according to Open Campus, a nonprofit news outlet that reports on higher ed. The program has been in operation since 2016.

“The shape and tenor of this new system is causing significant damage to the framework of college-in-prison,” Jessica Neptune, the director of national engagement for the Bard Prison Initiative at Bard College in New York, wrote in an email to Stateline.

“Much of the recent policy work related to Pell, especially, is moving in a direction that makes it harder and harder for colleges to just be colleges and not criminal justice interventions,” she said.

The Department of Education did not directly respond to advocates’ concerns about the new application requirements, but said it held a “negotiated rulemaking process that enlisted significant stakeholder input to put forward the best regulations possible.”

Some prison education advocates also argue that the new bureaucratic process isolates the mission of educating incarcerated students from that of other students and encourages the “othering” of current or formerly incarcerated individuals.

“Whenever we are creating separate systems for individuals — particularly when they’re incarcerated — that reinforce processes, isolation and marginalization, it is not going to go well,” said Dyjuan Tatro, a senior government affairs officer with the Bard Prison Initiative and a Bard College alum.

“Incarcerated students should have the same access to Pell Grants, full stop, as any other students in this country,” Tatro said.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on and .

In July, a federal rule change ended this ban, instantly making 767,000 incarcerated people eligible to use Pell’s $7,395 annual stipend to pay for higher education. For advocates who have long sought this reversal, including college officials and justice reform proponents, there’s a realization that now, the hard work will begin.

“It’s so easy to turn things off,” said Ruby Qazilbash, deputy director of the Policy Office for the federal Bureau of Justice Assistance. “It’s difficult to turn them back on,” she added, referring to the arduous process needed to create new prison education programs. 

Ben Jones, education director for Wisconsin’s Department of Corrections, issued a warning to college and prison officials: “It’s not only a lot of work, but it’s expensive work.”

The move back toward allowing incarcerated students to access federal student financial aid began in 2015, when President Barack Obama initiated the . This allowed 67 colleges to begin prison education programs and made Pell funds available to those schools’ imprisoned students. By 2021-22, those 6,000 participants had more than doubled, to 13,186, according to a . In all, nearly 41,000 incarcerated students participated in Second Chance Pell, earning about 12,000 credentials.

Then, 2½ years ago, as part of the FAFSA Simplification Act, Congress that ended the ban, effective this past July. Celebrating the Pell ban rollback at a conference in Washington, D.C., this summer, James Kvaal, undersecretary of the U.S. Department of Education, said that this “expanding opportunity has transcended politics.”

Now, colleges and prisons in nearly every state are attempting to create new initiatives. There’s no official count of how many schools are starting to offer classes behind bars, but enthusiasm is high, said Ruth Delaney, Vera’s associate initiative director. 

But crafting a college program inside prison isn’t easy.

There are three main steps: colleges and prisons must design a course of study, have the plan approved by the school’s accreditors and, if students will attempt to use Pell funds, apply for authorization from the U.S. Department of Education.

Jones is part of his state’s committee that reviews prospective programs. That group sets concrete guidelines for everything from how students will access technology to how frequently professors will hold office hours. “We’ve scared some schools away” because of the number of questions asked, he admitted.

Laura Ferguson Mimms, executive director of the Tennessee Higher Education in Prison Initiative, agreed with Jones. “Operational things can create so many barriers” in prison programs, she said. “We want to know everything” about the plans. 

When building a relationship between a prison and a college, both sides need to “go slow in order to go fast,” she said. 

The idea of each state setting up a task force to oversee prison education programs is gaining momentum, Delaney said, especially because all federally approved programs need to be reviewed after two years. Having a formal structure in place before a program starts can lessen review surprises, she said. Up to 15 states, including Tennessee, Kansas, Mississippi, Georgia and Michigan, have task forces, Delaney said. These groups typically include college accreditors, state higher education officials, incarcerated people and corrections officials. 

The structure of prison education programs can vary widely, from full-time in-person classes to hybrid to fully online. While most schools prefer in-person instruction, a hybrid option can allow incarcerated students to mix with those who are on campus, Delaney said, sometimes increasing the types of courses that can be offered to those imprisoned. At California’s Pitzer College, students participating in the Inside-Out program travel to the California Rehabilitation Center to take in-person classes with incarcerated students. Three imprisoned students from the center graduated with bachelor’s degrees this summer. 

While the rollback marks a major change for higher education prison programs, Delaney said, many may avoid using Pell Grants if they can find funding elsewhere. “Pell is fantastic, but it’s very hard to file a FAFSA [form] in prison” because incarcerated students often cannot access the proper documentation, she said. Filing the federal financial aid form is required to receive a Pell Grant.

In states, such as Tennessee and California, that offer residents free community college tuition, it’s easier to use state funding than Pell Grants. That’s the case for College of the Redwoods, a community college in northern California that has been running classes at the supermax Pelican Bay State Prison for eight years.

But, using Pell funds is key for a new bachelor’s degree program being set up by California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, said Steve Ladwig, director of the school’s Transformative and Restorative Education Center. 

That program, which begins in January, will enroll students who have completed an associate degree with College of the Redwoods. Although Pell eligibility doesn’t factor into acceptance decisions, “with Pell, we can serve a lot more students,” Ladwig said. 

Being chosen for Second Chance Pell also changed the University of Wyoming’s program. The school had started by offering single classes to imprisoned students without putting anyone on a path to a degree. But because Pell funds can cover full-time students’ tuition, the university ramped up its Pathways from Prison program, said Robert Colter, co-executive director. “Pell is absolutely critical for creating a sustainable degree path.” 

Wyoming’s program started at the state’s only women’s prison so the university would not have to deal with students being transferred to other facilities, Colter said. But the school also just launched a program at a men’s prison for the fall semester, he added.

Like Wyoming, College of the Redwoods began with one group of students taking one class, said Rory Johnson, dean of the Pelican Bay Scholars Program. There are now as many as . “We started small and just added as we got better at it,” he said.

Beyond financial considerations, reinstatement of Pell is meaningful for imprisoned students, said Humboldt’s Tony Wallin-Sato, a formerly incarcerated individual who has earned a college degree. “It tells people who are incarcerated, you do deserve this, you are human beings. It validates something.” Wallin-Sato is the program coordinator of the school’s Project Rebound, a program that helps formerly imprisoned students attend college. 

As colleges explore creating programs behind bars, Colter cautioned, they must pay attention to the demands that starting a prison program places on internal staff. Instructors might have to adjust classes for students who can’t access the internet or create a way to run a lab inside a correctional facility.

And because prisons are typically located far from college campuses, travel can be a major consideration. Wyoming Women’s Center is in rural Lusk, 2½ hours from the university. Because of the distance, classes are hybrid, with most instructors visiting the prison at least once, Colter said. The distance between Humboldt and Pelican Bay is 83 miles; while the university plans to make all its classes face to face, winter might impact traveling on rural roads, officials said. 

While it is typically not difficult to find instructors willing to be part of a prison program, Colter said having the backing of the entire school is vital. In Wyoming’s program, student support officials go to the prison to help with enrollment and to hunt down transcripts. “That can be really hard sometimes,” he added. 

Johnson agreed that it is important to get different department officials to buy into a program, even if most of them will never visit the prison. For example, Redwoods had eliminated all its paper forms, but because of limitations on technology in the prison, it had to re-create a system to enroll imprisoned students using paper, he said. The school also created a policy to accept unofficial transcripts because so many long-term incarcerated people at Pelican Bay had trouble procuring accurate documents. 

It’s not clear how many students it might take for a college program to break even financially, said Delaney, adding that Vera plans to conduct a cost analysis of prison programs soon. But Mark Taylor, a formerly incarcerated prisoner who earned a degree at Humboldt, came up with his own calculus. He estimated that California spent $1.5 million to keep him locked up for 21 years. “I earned a bachelor’s degree for under $30,000, and now I’m paying taxes, a significant amount.” Taylor is a youth outreach coordinator at Project Rebound.

“At some point, you’re asking the wrong question if you’re asking if we can afford” prison education programs, said Maxwell Schnurer, a Humboldt communications professor and the leader of its upcoming prison program. “It’s more like, can we afford to have a bunch of uneducated folks in our community? I would say no.”

“It’s not just about having them pass classes,” said Colter. “We have a saying at our school: Prepare for complete living. That’s what I have in mind.”