The Education Justice Project
The Education Justice Project (EJP) offers education programs to men incarcerated at Danville Correctional Center, a state prison about 35 miles east of the Urbana-Champaign campus. EJP has served Danville students since 2008.
The mission of the Education Justice Project is to build a model college-in-prison program that demonstrates the positive impacts of higher education upon incarcerated people, their family members, the neighborhoods from which they come, the host institution, and society as a whole. EJP is supported in its work by the Humanities Research Institute via financial assistance and through collaborative programming that is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
The core of EJP’s program is upper-division U of I courses, which are taught at the prison by university faculty and advanced graduate students, currently numbering about seventy. EJP also offers a range of extracurricular activities, including a Theatre Initiative; writing, computer, science, and math workshops; guest lecture series; reading groups; and tutoring. With the assistance of faculty and graduate students in the College of Education, EJP continues to engage in a multi-stage evaluation, with the aim of producing data that will support prison higher-education programs efforts nationwide.