When Heaven Benjamin arrived at Rikers Island at the end of 2023, she felt like the legal process just happened to her. She didn’t really understand how to best participate in her own court proceedings.
That changed after she enrolled in a class offered by LaGuardia Community College, where she learned the legal terminology and how to navigate the criminal justice system.
“I learned how to go about my criminal process, how to ask questions, how to file appeals,” she said at an end-of-semester celebration last June. “They brought in people like the DA [district attorney]. They took us through real court cases and the process of grand jury indictments. It was like I was in the courtroom.”
It made a lasting impact on Benjamin, but incarcerated people at Rikers may not have access to such education for much longer. Amid ongoing reports of violence and neglect, at the end of November a federal judge ordered the city to prepare for potential external takeover of the jail system.
New York City intends to replace the Rikers Island jail complex with four borough-based jails by 2027. During the transition, education programs—shown to be a key factor in improving safety and reducing recidivism—are operating in a state of limbo and uncertainty.
Educators teaching there say there will be an urgent need for education until the very last day Rikers remains open. And as the new borough-based jails take shape, they wonder how the new facilities will engage local colleges.
The challenges of jail education
In fall 2023, 19 men finished their first college class through LaGuardia’s college program at Rikers, offered in partnership with the nonprofit College Way. The class teaches students how to navigate the legal system and helps them learn study skills and classroom etiquette. It also engages community college students—many studying criminal justice—who help facilitate the classes. This gives them firsthand experience working with incarcerated individuals and a deeper understanding of systemic issues.
Since that first class, the program has rotated to the women’s jail and a facility housing young men. But as New York City’s troubled jail complex moves toward closure, such opportunities are rare. LaGuardia and Columbia University are the only two colleges currently teaching at Rikers, serving just a fraction of the roughly 7,000 people detained there.
Jails typically house individuals in pre-trial detention or serving shorter sentences, leading to high population turnover and making consistent educational programming a challenge. Full degree or certificate programs are harder to offer in jails than in state prisons, where people serve longer sentences. But case processing delays and recent changes in bail reform—leaving the population composed of those facing more serious charges—mean that many people are spending years on Rikers.
Cory Rowe, a criminology professor at LaGuardia, said that the average student in their program has been detained for two years. One woman who completed the LaGuardia class in spring 2024 said she earned enough credits for almost a year of college by taking one course at a time from three different institutions over the three-and-a-half years she’d been at Rikers.
The class provides an overview of the fundamentals of criminal law and trial procedures and helps them understand how to continue their education after release or if they are transferred to a state prison.
“We’ve taken for granted that people who commit crime know the law or how court systems work. The first thing we realized was that there was a basic lack of understanding of how the criminal justice system even worked. Our students didn’t know some of the terminology.”
Cory Rowe, criminology professor at LaGuardia Community College
“We’ve taken for granted that people who commit crime know the law or how court systems work,” says Rowe. “The first thing we realized was that there was a basic lack of understanding of how the criminal justice system even worked. Our students didn’t know some of the terminology.”
Rowe and Kathy Mora, director of College Way, adapted the first-year seminar required for all criminal justice majors at LaGuardia to the jail setting. The curriculum is designed to be flexible, allowing students who are transferred or placed in segregated housing to complete their coursework by mail. Those who enroll at LaGuardia after release can apply to receive credit for the class.
In addition to serving their students inside, Rowe and Mora use the class as an opportunity to provide experiential learning opportunities for community college students. At the American Society of Criminology annual conference in San Francisco in November, they presented findings of a study they did on the impact of the program on the undergraduates who help facilitate the program through internships or work study opportunities.
Educating future front line workers
“Given that there’s so much research already on the benefits of higher education for people in prison, we wanted to shift the focus to…the benefits of engaging future criminologists —criminal justice majors at community college — who are most likely to become the front line workers in these new jails,” Rowe said.
They found that students who work with the Rikers programs transformed their initial perceptions of incarcerated people, developed a critical understanding of systemic issues in criminal justice, gained nuanced perspectives of different actors in the system, and enhanced their professional development as future criminal justice professionals.
Amy Chi has been a justice fellow with College Way since 2022. Just a few years ago, she never would have considered going to college. She believed real learning happens through life experience, not in the classroom. “I always prided myself on being self-educated,” she said.
But then she met Rowe, who encouraged her to rethink her educational pathway and consider community college. Two years later, Chi is now a student at John Jay College and working with College Way to design instructional materials for the Rikers course.
Chi says her own background has helped her relate to the incarcerated students, who often have to take charge of their own learning because of lack of access to educational opportunities inside.
Now Chi wants to pursue a career path combining instructional design and prison education. “I don’t preach college as a one-size-fits-all solution for everybody, but I’ve come to see its place in opening doors for people, whether that’s for somebody like myself, or somebody that’s justice-impacted,” Chi said.
When Rowe and Mora asked their LaGuardia students how they felt about the Rikers closure, one of them succinctly captured the dilemma that remains: “My fear is that in between, when they have most of it emptied but not all, nothing will be left for them, and nothing will be ready.”
“Education is always in demand”
As of December, there were three credit-bearing classes that rotate between the different jails on Rikers each semester, with around 15-20 students able to enroll in each class, said Latima Johnson, press officer for the New York City Department of Corrections.
In addition to LaGuardia’s class, Columbia University offers general education courses such as music history and philosophy.
Other college programs, like the credit-bearing courses previously offered by the John Jay College and Borough of Manhattan Community College, never resumed after COVID-19 halted in-person instruction in 2020. Several jails in the Rikers complex, including the one where the joint program operated, closed, further complicating efforts to restart.
Andre Ward, executive director of the Institute for Justice and Opportunity at John Jay, said that the college is currently in discussions with the corrections department about returning to Rikers, but that it was premature to say exactly what that engagement would look like. In the meantime, John Jay and BMCC have launched an associate’s degree program at Otisville, a state prison in upstate New York.
All programming at Rikers has been in flux for the last few years. In 2023, New York City Mayor Eric Adams cut $17 million worth of programs, including job readiness, reentry, and substance abuse classes, in hopes of saving money by having the corrections department take over programming that had been contracted to nonprofit organizations.
The budget was mostly restored last year, but Ward said the budget cuts not only disrupted direct service providers but also had indirect impacts on academic programs. “We were impacted just by virtue of providers not going in,” he said.
Ward, who was detained at Rikers as both a juvenile and an adult, is part of the Rikers Island Advisory Committee, a group tasked with advancing recommendations for the future of Rikers and the new borough-based jails. The new jails have been designed with input from directly-impacted individuals like himself, he said.
There will be more than enough space in the new jails to accommodate whatever educational programming is offered. “We understood that it had to have more light, more space – all of those things that are conducive to human beings learning and growing in a way that’s healthy for them,” he said.
Ward added that BMCC and City University of New York more broadly will be engaging with the new facilities. “We’re going to be working in those borough-based jails,” he said. “It’s a matter of what that looks like once they’re up and running.”
The New York City Department of Correction would welcome any other higher education institutions interested in offering classes at Rikers. “We continue to seek partnerships to plan and discuss future semesters and are open to meeting with area colleges to discuss how we could expand post-secondary offerings that will benefit those in custody,” Johnson said.
At LaGuardia, Rowe and Mora hope to expand the College Way model to the new facilities, connecting community colleges to local jails across New York City. They aim to build public support and political will to invest in evidence-based education programs in correctional facilities, Rowe said.
“The more we can have proven successes to show city council and others that this thing works, then we will continue to get the support we need to keep those programs in existence,” Ward said. “Education is always going to be in demand.”