Open Campus is expanding access to College Inside, its newsletter about prison education, to thousands of incarcerated readers through new partnerships with educational technology providers.
This will allow Open Campus to better serve those readers with curated content and service journalism that answers their questions about educational opportunities in prison and how to navigate barriers to accessing them. With no direct internet access, people in prison live in information deserts and often lack even basic information about higher education.
For the last year, Open Campus has been working with Edovo, a tech nonprofit that offers a tablet-based app that is available on both GTL and Securus devices provided to people in prisons in some states. All new issues of College Inside, as well as archives, are now available on the Edovo app. Open Campus also publishes a series of guides about topics such as Pell Grants, credit transfer, defaulted student loans, and how to request educational transcripts.
This fall, College Inside will also launch on Orijin (formerly APDS) tablets, which are available in states such as Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Utah, as well as the District of Columbia.
All College Inside content is made available to incarcerated readers at no cost to them. Open Campus will continue to offer a print newsletter in states where incarcerated individuals cannot access College Inside on tablets.
Readers who are unable to access tablets or who need a quarterly print copy for accessibility reasons are able to request an individual subscription here or by writing to Open Campus, 2460 17th Avenue #1015, Santa Cruz, CA 95062.
Outside readers can sign up to receive College Inside by email.
About College Inside
Launched in 2021, College Inside digs into the nexus of two major systems shaping our society: higher education and criminal justice.
College Inside is published by Open Campus and written and edited by Charlotte West, the only reporter in the country dedicated to covering prison education. Her expertise has shed new light on the most-pressing challenges facing incarcerated students and how issues like student debt, the return of Pell Grants for incarcerated students, and limited access to technology are shaping education and career paths during and after incarceration. Open Campus reporting on prison education is supported by Ascendium.