A Year at the Puttkammer Center for Education Justice

What makes for a great college or high school experience? Interesting and engaging classes are certainly part of it, but school - at any level - is so much more than the courses you take. Campus activities and student leadership opportunities, afterschool programs, study-groups, and peer tutoring programs are essential to ensure student engagement and success and a key part of school and college campuses across the country. Yet, they remain exceedingly rare inside carceral spaces, despite the great need. What is more, there is a dearth of research on how best practices tested on traditional campuses may be adapted to carceral spaces. 

In January 2024, we established the Puttkammer Center for Educational Justice to address this gap. Combining research with pilot program design and evaluation, the Puttkammer Center seeks to identify and promote promising practices in the field of carceral and reentry education, serving as a catalyst for scholarship and policy proposals that promote access to quality education behind and beyond bars, while leading the strategic growth of the Petey Greene Program.

Last year, the Puttkammer Center conducted and published research on blended learning, on the impact of PGP’s tutoring on student confidence and academic achievement, and on narratives of incarceration. Our research was shared far and wide, through conferences and lectures across the country, from Alabama to Ohio, Kentucky, and Connecticut.

Perhaps the greatest strength of the Puttkammer Center is its focus on the intersection between research and practice, which enables us to develop, pilot, and evaluate evidence-based pilot programs that address crucial gaps in the field. Our most promising pilots included a series of hands-on STEM demonstrations for incarcerated youth and a new training for incarcerated tutors, who now join the PGP’s traditional tutors to support the College Bridge program in correctional facilities in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. 

In 2025, we are continuing along this path, focusing on key issues identified in the PGP’s 2024-2028 strategic plan: English for Speakers of Other Languages, Digital literacy, and geographic expansion. Above all, we will continue to research and advocate for the need and effectiveness of holistic, individualized academic programs and support settings that create a continuum of educational opportunities before, during, and after higher education in prison.