Last month, Ithaka S+R welcomed Tommaso Bardelli as our new principal of justice initiatives. In this interview, we asked Tommaso about his past experience in the higher education in prison space, challenges and opportunities in the field, and the future of the work.

Prior to joining Ithaka S+R, you co-founded the Prison Education Program Research Lab at NYU and led research and popular education initiatives at Worth Rises. What sparked your interest in higher education in prison?

While at NYU, I taught college classes at Wallkill Correctional Facility, a medium-security prison an hour north of Manhattan. That experience had a tremendous impact on my own research and thinking. The idea of creating the Research Lab, a space where formerly incarcerated students could conduct research together with NYU faculty members on issues related to mass incarceration, came from a course on qualitative research methods I taught there. While most of my students at Wallkill struggled with college-level writing, their research insights were often on-point. Some of them, I thought, would have made for great social science researchers, if given the opportunity.

That semester I realized yet another one of the human and social costs of incarcerating 1.2 million of our fellow citizens, namely the tremendous amount of potential that gets locked up, and wasted, along the way. We know that higher education in prison can be transformative for people inside, but its impact on those of us on the outside is often overlooked. To me, bringing college courses behind bars means giving more people in our society the opportunity to be their best selves, liberating talent and ideas to benefit them, their communities, and ultimately society as a whole.

What do you think are some of the pressing challenges facing the field of higher education in prison today?

I think both the reinstatement of Pell Grants for incarcerated students, after a nearly three-decade ban, and the expansion of access to digital technology behind bars, which has further accelerated in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, present terrific opportunities, but also complex challenges for the field.

With the ban lifted, we are looking at over 750,000 people in prison becoming eligible to receive Pell Grants to fund their college education. That is exciting, as it enables far greater access to postsecondary education for people in prison, but we need the expansion to happen responsibly. This involves ensuring eligibility and reporting requirements to receive federal funding do not discourage colleges from creating new high-quality prison education programs, while also protecting students from predatory institutions, who are just interested in capturing the federal funds now attached to this student population. A lot of my work at Worth Rises focused just on these dynamics, the exploitation of incarcerated people by predatory corporations due to lack of protections and loose regulations, so this is a lens I will bring to the higher education field as well.

The expansion of digital technology, including the availability of personal tablets in a growing number of state correctional systems, presents a similar mix of opportunities and challenges for the field. Thanks to tablets, incarcerated learners have access to a wealth of information and educational resources, something unthinkable in prison spaces until not long ago. They also have an opportunity to build up their digital literacy skills, which will be crucial to their success after release. Once again, however, all this opportunity comes with risks, from private corporations using tablets to sell overpriced products to a literally captive market (something I wrote about in the past), to a shift to online-only education.

Now that you’re leading the justice initiatives team at Ithaka S+R, which initiatives or projects are you particularly excited about? Where do you see the future of the work going?

I was fortunate to find a number of exciting projects already happening when I stepped into this role. The justice initiatives team is doing incredible work to re-imagine educational spaces inside carceral facilities, expand access to law libraries and other vital resources for incarcerated people, preserve their creative and artistic production, and build better connections between colleges and universities and reentry services.

These projects well represent the breadth of work we want to continue doing at Ithaka S+R. We believe it is important to support cultural institutions—such as colleges and universities, but also museums and libraries—in playing their part in the rehabilitation of incarcerated people, and in their full reintegration after release. At the same time, we also want to recognize, celebrate, and preserve the contributions of incarcerated creatives to American culture for future generations—from visual art to writing and music.