Prison Education Program
The Boston University Prison Education Program, founded by labor organizer, tenant activist, and poet Elizabeth Barker, offers its first credit-bearing college courses at MCI/Norfolk prison. The program strives to provide the means whereby, through education, students currently imprisoned can become informed, successful, and contributing citizens. Students who earn 30 to 60 credits can apply the credits towards a Boston University bachelor’s degree and even go on to pursue a master’s degree. In 1991, the Prison Education Program expands to include MCI/Framingham, the only penal institution in Massachusetts for women. Boston University continues to be nationally recognized for its contribution to the lives of prisoners in the program, and by extension, its contribution to the prisons they inhabit, the families they left behind, and the communities to which they will return.
