image: Four incarcerated students share a laugh with instructor Jorge Rojas, far right, during a course taught at the Utah State Correctional Facility in August 2025. The Utah Prison Education Project conducts the Venture Course in partnership with Utah Humanities, Weber State University and the prison. Pictured left to right are Alicia, Lesha, Lindsay and Candace.
Credit: University of Utah, College of Education.
University of Utah education researchers have been awarded $8 million to launch the first national center dedicated to prison education research and leadership.
A team led by Erin Castro, an associate professor of educational leadership and policy, will use the grant to establish the Prison Education Action Research Lab, or PEARL, to advance educational justice for people and communities impacted by incarceration. The lab will serve as a vital resource in a growing field in need of the next generation of researchers, leaders and practitioners focused on prison education.
“As educators and educational scholars, our team brings a unique approach to addressing these challenges and providing leadership to the field,” said Castro, who also serves as the associate dean for community engagement and access in the Office of Undergraduate Studies. “What we currently know about postsecondary education in prison comes largely from the disciplinary field of criminology. Housing the Lab in the College of Education demonstrates a distinct disciplinary and pedagogical approach to the work, situating incarcerated people as college students.”
The grant comes from the Ascendium Education Group, a Madison, Wisc.-based philanthropic organization that promotes access to post-secondary education and workforce training.
Research shows providing learning opportunities to incarcerated populations carries broad societal impacts beyond prison walls, according to Castro.
“For practitioners, we know that access to quality postsecondary education during incarceration strengthens families and improves public safety,” she said. “We know the children of incarcerated learners have increased aspirations for education attainment and now we hope to tackle these kinds of questions empirically.”
PEARL embodies the best of what higher education can be, according to T. Chase Hagood, the university’s vice provost for student success.
“By expanding access to high-quality learning and elevating the scholarship that informs this work, Dr. Castro and her team are advancing a more just, more inclusive future for all learners,” Hagood said. “This is the kind of bold, evidence-driven innovation that transforms lives—and strengthens our communities, as well as our university, for generations to come.”
For College of Education Dean Frankie Santos Laanan, PEARL strengthens the U’s climbing presence as a national leader in prison education.
“It is never a given that academic research will translate directly and impactfully to the transformation of our local communities, but Dr. Erin Castro’s dedication to postsecondary education for incarcerated individuals over the last eight years is a shining example of scholarship with real societal impact,” Dean Laanan said. “Due in large part to Prof. Castro’s foundational work with the Utah Prison Education Project (UPEP), and now, the successful founding of PEARL, I firmly believe that the U is poised for national leadership in postsecondary education in prison.”
PEARL will further postsecondary education in prisons with three strategic focal points:
- Develop and deliver a professional online credential for prison education program leaders and practitioners, led by Paméla Cappas-Toro, PEARL’s director of teaching and learning.
- Provide a model of high-quality programming through the Utah Prison Education Project and the STEM Community Alliance Program, directed by Andy Eisen, PEARL’s director of prison education.
- PEARL’s anchor project, called the Prison Education Research Initiative (PERI), is a first-of-its-kind multi-institutional study that will address urgent policy- and practice-relevant research questions.
Led by Castro and co-PI Jason Taylor, associate professor of educational leadership and policy, PERI will collect systematic and longitudinal data on PEP programs, their students and their outcomes. In partnership with 22 or more colleges and universities, PERI will link postsecondary and workforce outcome data with institutional data on incarcerated learners across a diverse range of academic pathways and modalities.
Bringing practitioners and researchers together in partnership, this initiative aims to strengthen data and evaluation capacity so that practitioners can use these data to best support incarcerated students and alumni. It will also provide relevant and timely evidence on prison education programs to policymakers to enhance state and federal policies supporting incarcerated students, particularly as these programs grow and expand.