Since 2009, the Wesleyan Center for Prison Education has brought the liberal arts into Connecticut’s prisons, enabling transformative educational experiences, facilitating the contribution of incarcerated students to the dynamically diverse Wesleyan community, and advancing the University’s leadership as a creative force for expanding access to bold and rigorous liberal learning. The longest-running college-in-prison program in Connecticut, the Center for Prison Education has offered more than 245 credit-bearing courses alongside co-curricular programming, continually negotiating and renegotiating the access required to create high-caliber college experiences in our state’s correctional facilities. Over 200 unique incarcerated students have, in dialogue with Wesleyan faculty and campus student teaching assistants, honed skills of listening and engaging opposing views, deepened their knowledge and formed habits of bold inquiry, and practiced freedom in CPE classrooms.

Program Facts:

• In 2016, Wesleyan forged a private-public partnership with Middlesex Community College (now CT State Community College Middlesex) enabling the awarding of associate degrees to Center for Prison Education students; the program was selected as a Second Chance Pell pilot site in the first year of the experiment which returned federal financial aid to college-in-prison for the first time since 1994. In 2019, Wesleyan launched the non-residential Bachelor of Liberal Studies (BLS) degree program, extending bachelor’s degree attainment to incarcerated learners for the first time in Connecticut’s history.
• The Center for Prison Education is a proud member of the Womxn's Higher Education in Prison (WHEP) consortium and of the Consortium for the Liberal Arts in Prison. The Center's Director serves on a Working Group on higher education in prison under Connecticut's Criminal Justice Policy Advisory Admission.