Kenneth Hunter of the Virginia Consensus for Higher Education in Prison (Photo by Jay Paul)
In 1999, Kenneth Hunter had little reason to think about federal education policy. He was only 21 and facing a 22-year prison sentence for a nonviolent drug conviction.
A Lynchburg native, Hunter was raised in a religious, conservative household. Though he had an appetite for learning, his environment didn’t cultivate that kind of interest. “I was taught that this system of things wouldn’t be here much longer, and there was no need to worry about college,” Hunter says.
It wasn’t until he went to prison that Hunter started thinking about higher education. But five years prior to his conviction, the national Violent Crime Control Act had rendered incarcerated students ineligible for Pell Grant funding. When the legislation was passed, there were higher education programs in roughly 1,200 U.S. prisons. By 1997, only seven remained.
“Going into prison,” Hunter says, “I thought higher education would be available. I learned quickly that it wasn’t.”
When he was transferred to Nottoway Correctional Center in 2007, Hunter was finally able to take a community college class. He enrolled eagerly, with the excitement a rare opportunity often elicits. “It felt like a way to prove that I had made some significant changes,” he says.
But right after his orientation, Hunter was transferred to Buckingham Correctional Center. It was a lower-security facility that provided him a little more freedom, but no classes. He transferred several times over the next 15 years and never saw a prison classroom again.
Hunter now works in Richmond, on the other side of the system, to make sure others do. He’s the lead organizer for Virginia Consensus for Higher Education in Prison, a locally based initiative of the Virginia Interfaith Center for Public Policy. In his work he meets with legislators, educators and other advocates. He thinks about federal education policy all the time.
Pell Grant eligibility was fully restored to incarcerated students in 2023. But 80% to 90% of the classroom space in prisons is still dedicated to adult basic education, Hunter says, even though 62% of Virginia’s prison population — 14,000 people — is academically eligible for college. Only 600 incarcerated students are enrolled in a college program each year.
One of the challenges is space. Many prisons were built when education wasn’t part of the plan, so classrooms are few and far between. Those that exist are dated.
Julie Little, a biology professor at Rappahannock Community College in Warsaw, teaches lab science at Haynesville Correctional Facility in Richmond County. Her students come to class prepared, she says, but because there’s no technology on-site — or internet, even — if someone asks her something she doesn’t know, she can’t just look it up. It’s challenging, but “very refreshing,” she says.
Her students’ confidence greatly increases over time, Little says. And other inmates are incentivized, because good behavior is a requirement for enrollment. “Education is absolutely contagious,” she says. “They tell me all the time of others in their dorms who want to join the program.”
Students at Buckingham and Dillwyn correctional centers graduated with associate’s degrees from Piedmont Virginia Community College in May. (Photo courtesy Virginia Department of Corrections)
Terri Erwin, director of VCHEP, says reintegrating into communities is difficult for many people coming out of prison, but college classes help alleviate that. “When you’re incarcerated, you have a number and you have a last name. But the social aspect of prison settings is very quasi-military,” she says. “I’ve heard many say their college professors were the first people to use their [first] name in a really long time.”
There’s a public safety benefit, too. Erwin says it’s not easy to restart life post-prison, less so when finding a high-paying job is unlikely without an education. “We can’t hold people on the fringes as outsiders and be surprised if they find something to be a part of,” she says.
Hunter also says higher education is the key to reducing recidivism — repeat offense rates drop for those who receive any education at all. Education is directly correlated with the ability to find a good job. For those with a master’s degree, the recidivism rate is 0%.
Former inmates remain an “untapped resource” in the workforce partly due to stigma, Erwin says. When visualizing a formerly incarcerated person, people often draw on what they’ve seen in movies and on TV — caricatures of prisoners who are violent in a way that, for many, is not at all true.
But fighting the stigma is like “battling phantoms,” Erwin says, as the perception of risk is greater than the reality. Formerly incarcerated people have higher retention rates in the workforce, and Hunter says they tend to be harder-working than their counterparts, fueled by the desire to remain outside the bars.
General Assembly House Bill 1041, which calls for consistent education programming across state correctional facilities, passed in April of this year. Hunter, alongside VCHEP, helped advance it.
Although he enjoys influencing policy change, Hunter’s favorite part of his job is visiting prisons. “I hope to inspire a lot of the guys who know me,” he says. “It’s nothing like seeing their faces when I walk through the door, because they know I’m one of them. And to see me doing things successfully and not forgetting about them is the reason why I do the work.”
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