NCHEP 14 National Conference on Higher Education in Prison

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the 14th National Conference on Higher Education in Prison (NCHEP) in New Orleans. Among the highlights were meeting Richard Salas and Cory Pride from Unlocked Labs (more on their work below), a great conversation over breakfast with Dr. Julian Branch from Mission College, seeing the amazing Jennifer Gomez present about the UCI LIFTED program that I have taught for during my Ph.D., and meeting one of my favorite authors in this space, Dr. Erin Castro at University of Utah, whose group presented alongside a currently incarcerated woman in one of their programs who joined the conference virtually.

One of the really special things about this conference is getting to hear a completely different perspective on issues like technology integration in prisons, and especially those that are informed by lived experience of incarceration. Jessica Hicklin and her team at Unlocked Labs are an amazing example of this. I got to hear Jessica and her co-executive director Haley Shoaf present about the work going on at their nonprofit with being a resource for different state corrections agencies on upgrading (or building from scratch) their technology infrastructure. I see their group as a being a wealth of knowledge that often feels missing from conversations on the challenges of prison education, a really concrete grasp of the actual technical details and logistics of the current landscape of technology in prisons, as well as a strong vision for what it should be. Their growing experience working with different states shows in their ability to discuss nuances on a state-by-state and facility-by-facility level, and connect broader themes that have stood out from this work. I left this presentation feeling really hopeful about the improvement of technology infrastructure in prisons over the next 5-10 years as they continue to grow this work (they said they have currently worked with or talked to about 30 states, and are still growing).

I think the improvement of technology infrastructure in prisons will remove some of the immediate concerns/hesitations surrounding teaching computing in prisons (e.g., eliminating the extra time it takes for instructors like myself to try to compensate for students not being able to run their own code, so CS courses in prison can start to function more similarly to those on main campus). Then, the focus of the problem can shift to less obvious barriers like self-efficacy and belonging beliefs specific to computer science, such as those held by older students and those who have been blocked from accessing technology for long periods of time during their incarceration.