About

I. Background  

Western Michigan University Higher Education for the Justice-Involved (HEJI; formerly Prison Education Outreach Program) has operated in close partnership with the Michigan Department of Corrections since 2017, offering coursework and mentoring sessions to incarcerated individuals at the Lakeland Correctional Facility Coldwater, MI. With readings and assignments based on upper-level philosophy courses, the program administered the following sessions at the Lakeland facility during its successful pilot phase: Critical Thinking (Fall 2018); Introduction to Ethics (Spring 2019); Education and Human Flourishing (Fall 2019); and Ethical and Social Theory: Mass Incarceration in the U.S. (Spring 2020; Covid-impacted). 

II. Launch of Credit- and Credential-Bearing Programming 

In August of 2023, HEJI began its full credit- and credential conferring programming at WMU-Coldwater (Lakeland Correctional Facility). The core purpose of HEJI is to provide incarcerated students with access to higher education in prison, which has been shown to provide myriad benefits to the individual, the prison, the surrounding community, and society. To successfully complete this rigorous interdisciplinary liberal arts degree program, students must earn a minimum of 122 college credits over approximately five years.

III. About the Proposed Liberal Arts Coursework 

The Liberal Arts coursework allows students to engage with fundamental concerns of the human experience via the study of important texts in the humanities, social sciences, and beyond. The coursework will:

• cultivate the critical thinking, analytic, and creative skills which enable students to more clearly think, read, write, and speak—skills which enable students to succeed as citizens, regardless of vocation
• prepare students to analyze evidence, synthesize conflicting points of view, evaluate assumptions and biases to attain a balanced perspective, and develop critical interpretations of their significance

• provide students with a shared intellectual experience so often absent from institutions of higher education. 

  Through the study of important works in the humanities, social sciences, and beyond, Student Planned Major coursework provides students with the opportunity to engage with many of life’s key questions (What does it mean to be human? What is freedom? Who am I? What is love?) and themes (justice, truth, resilience, identity). In our search for understanding, we ask questions of things, of books, of people, and so on. But things, books, and people also ask questions of us; they question us right back. This type of education is not an alternative to professional or technical modes of education—it is the very foundation on which they stand.