Can a pair of dice change someone’s life? The ones Jill Knapp keeps above her desk in Peyton Hall might have. The dice, oversized and plush, are one of the objects Knapp, Emerita Professor of Astrophysical Sciences, has been using to teach math in prison for almost two decades. ‘Look around the room,’ she would tell students in her statistics class, ‘and tell me the probability this is a random sample’. The probability that, given the demographics of the United States, the people sitting in the education wing of a correctional facility have been brought there through a fair process. “It was ten to the power of negative ten,” she said: one in ten thousand million.
Princeton’s Prison Teaching Initiative (PTI), of which Knapp was a co-founder, has grown tremendously in size and scope since its beginnings in 2005. Once involving a handful of Astrophysics professors and graduate students who carpooled to teach algebra inside Garden State Youth Correctional Facility, PTI is now composed of more than 100 volunteers and offers between 30 and 40 courses a year in six correctional facilities across New Jersey, spearheading efforts to strengthen community college engagement. It has helped dozens of incarcerated people get associate’s degrees from Raritan Valley College while incarcerated and has even given some the opportunity to conduct research on Princeton’s campus. But one thing has remained constant: the initiative’s power to transform people through education, and education itself in the process.
The Early Days
PTI was founded in 2005, when a climate of urgency surrounded prison education. The expansion of the carceral system was spiking, following the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement law, the country’s largest crime bill in history. The number of incarcerated people tripled in size in the decade following the passing of the bill, according to The Sentencing Project. This huge influx of people would have already overwhelmed existing prison teaching efforts. But the Clinton Crime Bill, as the 1994 law is known, also prohibited incarcerated people from accessing Pell grants, making attending college on the inside near impossible. Prisons were well-funded, but educational programs within them were not. By 2004, the only institution in New Jersey offering classes for incarcerated people was Mercer County Community College, and they could amount to, at most, a one-year certificate.
It was in this context that Mark Krumholz came to Princeton.
When Krumholz, a theoretical astrophysicist studying the formation of stars and galaxies, applied to join the Princeton Astrophysics department as a postdoctoral researcher, he did not just include application information about the science he wanted to do. He also expressed his intention to start an initiative to educate incarcerated people, after working with the Prison University Project, now Mount Tamalpais, while at UC Berkeley.
Jill Knapp, then-Director of Graduate Studies, was the one to read his application. The fellowship he was to be awarded required that he spend a quarter of his time on innovative teaching in the sciences. Krumholz’s vision for educating incarcerated people would have meant, inevitably, that prison teaching was to become associated with the Astrophysical Sciences department. On an antiquated, terminal-based email client called Pine, Knapp sent a blast to ask her colleagues whether they were on board with this outcome. It was met with a unanimous “Yes.”
Once established, PTI was funded entirely out of pocket by Knapp, and contributions made by other faculty members and instructors. “It wasn’t an official thing,” Knapp said of the early days of the program. “We [only] needed books and pencils and paper for the students.” One time, Knapp recounted, members of the department found out she was purchasing textbooks for students, and the next day, she found in her mailbox “four or five envelopes, stuffed with $20s that people had just collected to give.”
“What is beautiful is that we never had to recruit teachers,” Knapp said. “I’d hear a knock on my door here, [and] some people put their head in the door and say, ‘I hear you have this prison teaching thing, and I’d like to get involved.’” Professor Jenny Greene, a co-founder of PTI and now its Academic Director, said she “didn’t spend more than about 10 seconds thinking about it.”
An early goal was to ensure that incarcerated students could graduate with a two-year Associate’s Degree through the program, so they could apply for a four-year diploma as a transfer student after their incarceration. They started with the basics: algebra, pre-calculus, and, given the first home of PTI, Astronomy 101, which Knapp joked is “the gateway drug for getting people interested in science.” Within a few years, the program expanded to include Botany, Chemistry, and English composition; educators began to teach at several state prisons.
New Beginnings
In 2012, PTI began to expand. A new director was appointed: Jill Stockwell, a graduate student in Comparative Literature at the time. The organization joined with other prison education initiatives around the state, Drew University, Raritan Valley Community College and Rutgers, to found The New Jersey Scholarship and Transformative Education in Prisons (NJ-STEP) initiative. The merger made it easier to coordinate courses between institutions, to validate curricula, and ensure that students would be able to get either their Associate’s from Raritan Valley, or their Bachelor’s in Justice Studies from Rutgers. It also facilitated collaboration with the NJ Department of Corrections and the State Parole Board, secure funding for administrators, and counselors that would help students in their academic paths.
For many, the programming offered by NJ-STEP and, by extension, PTI, was a chance to attain the education they had always wanted to pursue. This is how Paul Boyd, now a senior studying Philosophy at Rutgers-Camden and a Truman scholar, felt when he started attending courses in 2014. “That’s when the real part of my college experience began,” he said. He felt that his life instantly improved, because he was “doing something [he] should have done a long time ago”. Boyd, the first person in his family to go to college, had always wanted to go, having been a big reader throughout his life. “But,” he said, “I never had anyone who invested in my intelligence.”
Many of his peers, he recalls, took classes “just to have something to do.” Boyd would see moments “when the lightbulb turns on in a person” – when other students would realize their own potential and start seeking to apply it. Boyd said getting an education while being incarcerated reshapes one’s perspective. Inside, the image he remembers is “dark and meek and hopeless,” but he remembered the classrooms as being a safe place for everyone: “It was our time in the day to be normal.”
Research, Experiences
The PTI’s administration wanted to expand to allow its students to experience multiple facets of education and empower them to find careers after their sentence. In 2017, the National Science Foundation’s INCLUDES Initiative opened that door. INCLUDES aimed to support increasing diversity in STEM, such that the workforce reflected the diversity of the general population of the country. PTI secured a grant from the Foundation in 2017, allowing it to start the first Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program at Princeton targeted exclusively toward formerly incarcerated students. The aim, said Jill Stockwell, was “demystifying what a STEM field is, showing that people are using math and science regularly, intuitively, in real ways.”
“It was like 10 years’ worth of education, ” said Ali Muslim, an REU alum who studied phonetic crystals with Professor Andrej Košmrlj in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering department. Muslim was incarcerated in 1985, when he was 16 years old, and returned to society in 2021. He completed the Emma Bloomberg Center’s Aspiring Scholars and Professionals program his first summer back, and returned to Princeton’s campus the following summer for an REU. “The program is not only about getting an assignment and completing it,” he said. “You meet and build relationships with individuals.”
The REUs also brought formerly incarcerated students on Princeton’s campus, and “honed and sharpened” their academic focus through Princeton’s curriculum, according to Chris Etienne, then-STEM Coordinator of the REU program hired using NSF’s grant money. “So we [were] like, it’d be awesome if our students on the inside had that opportunity to be here and learn as well,” he said.
“[My] first summer there, I used to sit out at night and just stare at the sky and enjoy the atmosphere. It was so good all night,” said Ali Muslim about his experience on Princeton’s campus.
People in STEM, and STEM for the People
PTI’s and NSF’s support for diversity in academia comes from a belief that science benefits from a diversity of voices. As Etienne put it, “diversity is the springboard to innovation.” Questions are shaped by whoever is asking them, and scientists do not ask questions in isolation. It is scientific communities that decide what is interesting to study within a discipline; if the demographics of that community changes, the conversation might change too. A study by Freeman and Huang published in Nature, for instance, analyzed the bibliometric data of more than 2.5 million papers and found that “papers with four or five authors of multiple ethnicities have, on average, one to two more citations than those written by authors all of the same ethnicity.” This in turn can amount to up to 10% more engagement – and therefore impact – of a publication. Environmental science, for example, has sought to prioritize justice in its scholarship, platforming diverse voices to ensure that its research aligns with the needs of marginalized communities. Diversifying who can call themself a scientist matters for more than just the dynamism of the scientific project; it also is a way to disrupt the common understanding of who can be a scientist and open up the field to individuals to whom it has historically blocked access.
Boyd, who spent his summer in 2023 mutating intrinsically disordered genes and tracking how they fold, found it important for people with backgrounds similar to his own to interact with STEM, even if their degree is not in science. At the time of his internship, he was still on parole and was living in a halfway house. He didn’t have access to technology, and he commuted to campus for two hours every day. “[Formerly incarcerated] people come from marginalized communities, and they generally don’t have access to science” he said. “I didn’t grow up seeing doctors, engineers, astrophysicists.” To Boyd, coming from a disadvantaged background does not limit people’s potential, but it limits what people think they can achieve. “Through these internships, I found what I have a gift in, and I found out what I’m talented in. For most of my life, I didn’t know what my gifts were,” he said.
Indeed, building self-confidence in students when it comes to academics is something at the forefront of PTI administrators and educators alike. Students who take non-traditional paths to education often have skewed perceptions of their own abilities, especially when it comes to science and math. Tejas Dethe, MAE graduate student and Pedagogy Fellow at PTI, has experienced this first-hand while teaching on the inside. “My students have been told very hurtful things about their abilities [in the past] and many come into the classroom thinking that they are going to do bad,” Dethe said. “So when they do well, they are surprised.”
Teaching on the inside invites students to unlearn certain patterns of thought about themselves and their ability to learn. Dethe believes that this learning process can have transformative impacts outside of the classroom. “If students can go from ‘I’m not cut out for this’ to ‘I can do this’ for math, they can do it for other things, too,” he said.
Etienne rejects the idea that some of his students are “dropouts,” stating that in many cases they are actually “pushouts” – a term coined by Vanderbilt professor Richard Milner to describe individuals who struggle academically because of structural inadequacies in their education. According to Milner, if a school lacks the instructors or materials necessary for a quality education, students respond by turning away from education and are more likely to blame themselves for their perceived failure. Therefore, PTI’s aim is twofold: it strives to give students equal access to education and to use the process of education to give students the space to think critically about who they are and the larger systemic issues that have affected their life. In seeking to undo the damage of inadequate educational resources, PTI hopes to provide students with the tools, experience, and resources to in the words of Etienne, “have lofty goals.”
Following their experiences with PTI, some students make it their goal to help those around them. For example, Boyd is applying for a PhD in Social Work, and Muslim hopes to become a licensed therapist in the future. Muslim also noted that when he interned at PTI last summer, several of the interns expressed interest in using their education to help others. “They were going to take what they learned and take it back to the neighborhoods,” he said, citing the example of a friend who went to Rutgers-Camden at the same time as Muslim and is now planning to open a business to teach children how to code in Python.
The Future
PTI is now part of Princeton’s new Program for Community College Engagement (PCCE), a consortium of other educational programs at Princeton with the goals of “strengthening relationships with partner institutions and expanding pathways to a liberal arts-based college education,” said University Director of Media Relations Jennifer Morrill. But PTI has not always held a well-defined place within the University. PCCE came out of President Eisgruber’s declared commitment to “examining and uprooting systemic racism at Princeton,” following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, according to Morrill.
Even in 2012, when PTI became a more formal organization, and represented Princeton among the other institutions in New Jersey, the only funding it received from the University was for “half an administrator,” as Greene put it. For several years, PTI floated around education-related spaces within the University. It had a brief stint with the Pace Center, and a partnership with Teacher Prep, and only in 2017 was it offered office space within McGraw. In 2019, its Administrator and Director both got promoted to full-time employees, and this year, PTI could hire two new instructional specialists to take on administrative duties that previously were performed by grad student volunteers. “The support for our program is very real. It’s not lip service,” Jill Stockwell said about the attention PTI has received from the University in recent years.
Now supported by University resources in PCCE, PTI hopes to take the next step in its mission to bring the highest quality of education to incarcerated students: offering Princeton credit for the classes Princeton instructors teach on the inside. Doing this would formalize the role Princeton plays in the education of incarcerated students, and would help prove to future employers and admission committees that they have successfully completed classes held at Princeton’s educational standards.
The University is not yet an accrediting partner in NJ-STEP, but PTI recently got approval from a University planning committee to do so in the future, according to Greene. She hopes that the astronomy class she will teach Princeton undergraduates in the spring might at the same time be offered to incarcerated students as well. The class, which will introduce students to research in astronomy by having astronomical data and interpret it, will be taught in this paired way because, as Greene put it, is “one of the mechanisms we know will work” to offer Princeton credit.
According to Morrill, this is part of a broader effort for the University to bring more non-traditional students to campus, especially during a nationwide decline in non-traditional school enrollment down to 6.3 million people, 21.2% decrease over the past decade, according to the Postsecondary National Policy Institute. Administrators see the need to bring non-traditional, and formerly incarcerated students on Princeton’s campus. “The University recognized the strength of those populations,” said Jill Stockwell. “People who are the closest to problems are also the closest to the solution.”
Second Look is a way for Teo Grosu to disrupt the common understanding and open up the field.