Welcome
Founded in 1993 by Dr. Carolyn Eggleston and Dr. Thom Gehring, the Center for the Study of Correctional Education (CSCE) at California State University, San Bernardino is an interdisciplinary Center that provides professional development for prison educators, facilitates educational programs in SoCal prisons, and supports research initiatives related to prison education and reentry.
The CSCE supports two prison education programs:
The Inside Out Prison Exchange Program provides for-credit college courses at the California Rehabilitation Center in Norco, CA. This model of prison education brings together inside (incarcerated) and outside (non-incarcerated) students to take classes inside of correctional facilities. During the 2022-2023 academic year, the program has expanded to offer two classes per semester. Our goal is to welcome the first cohort of B.A. students in fall 2023. To hear CSUSB students talk about their Inside-Out experience in fall 2021, please watch this 20-minute YouTube video. Please contact our current director, Dr. Alexandra Cavallaro, with any inquiries.
Our partnership with the Prison Education Project allows us to offer educational workshops in prisons alongside other local universities. This affords CSUSB students the opportunity to try their hand at teaching for the first time, as well as to encounter incarcerated people as equals—whenever they are not teaching, they participate in the class alongside incarcerated students. Learn more about the CSCE Prison Education Project. Please contact our assistant director, Dr. Vanessa Ovalle-Perez, with any inquiries.
Mission and Values
In our collaborations with scholars, educators, and activists across the U.S. and several foreign countries, the Center’s work is guided by the following values:
- We value the voices, experiences, interests, and knowledge of incarcerated people.
- We believe that education is a human right. Education needs to traverse borders and boundaries, including prison boundaries, and so we seek to foster literacy practices that enrich lives both inside and outside the prison gates.
- We are committed to an intersectional approach to literacy education, one that recognizes the complexity of each person’s relationship to power and privilege.
- We believe learning is a lifelong process and should be open to all people regardless of sentence length and status in the criminal justice system.
- We believe that education is reciprocal, meaning that everyone has something to teach and everyone has something to learn.
- We believe that educators should be prepared for the particularities of teaching in the prison system and should engage in continual professional development and reflection on their work.
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