5 takeaways from AP’s reporting on Pell Grants for prisoners getting college degrees

By AARON MORRISON
AP National Writer

Thousands of prisoners throughout the United States get their college degrees behind bars, most of them paid for by the federal Pell Grant program, which offers the neediest undergraduates tuition aid that they don’t have to repay. That program is about to expand exponentially next month, giving about 30,000 more students behind bars some $130 million in financial aid per year. The new rules, which overturn a 1994 ban on Pell Grants for prisoners, begin to address decades of policy during the “tough on crime” 1970s-2000 that brought about mass incarceration and stark racial disparities in the nation’s 1.9 million prison population.