The Education Justice Project is a college-in-prison program bringing higher education to incarcerated people, with the mission of enriching their lives as well as the lives of their families, the communities from which they come, the University, and society as a whole.

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students sitting at desksSLCL faculty regularly participate in this campus-wide initiative administered by the College of Education.

EJP is a vibrant academic community of students, educators, and others committed to expanding higher education within American prisons as a matter of justice. Our mission is to demonstrate the positive impacts of college-in-prison programs. In pursuit of that mission, EJP organizes educational programming at Danville Correctional Center through the University of Illinois. In addition, EJP members also produce critical scholarship about prison education, as well as creative works.

Offsite, EJP conducts outreach to family members of EJP students and to released EJP students, our alumni. Increasingly, EJP alumni are involved in leading such initiatives. We also conduct regular events on the University of Illinois campus to which we invite members of the larger Urbana-Champaign community. We seek to increase critical awareness of issues related to incarceration and criminal justice in Illinois and beyond.

We are committed to building an open, safe, gentle, inclusive learning environment with EJP. We believe that a rigorous and critical education program requires the cultivation of such an environment and that self-reflection is an important part of creating and sustaining such an environment.

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