About the Center for Educational Justice
The Puttkammer Center for Educational Justice is a division of the Petey Greene Program dedicated to expanding access to high-quality education in prisons and after release. We identify what works in carceral and reentry education, and advocate for the research, policy, and practice changes needed to bring it to scale nationally.
Our work builds on the Petey Greene Program's deep network of researchers, educators, and advocates—and on the knowledge of the people closest to the problem: those who have lived it. We center the experiences of system-impacted people in everything we do, from the research questions we ask to the coalitions we build.
The Center supports research that shifts how the field thinks about prison education, incubates promising new programs, and brings together practitioners, scholars, and formerly incarcerated leaders to advocate for lasting change. Our goal is simple: every person, inside or outside prison walls, deserves the chance to learn.
Recent research:
Results from Our 2025 Student Survey
The Impact of Volunteering in Carceral Spaces
Explore programs we have developed:
The Inside Tutor Training Program is designed to prepare incarcerated individuals to serve as academic leaders and mentors for their peers. Incarcerated scholars are already self-organizing to advance each other’s academic goals—our training supports and professionalizes these efforts.
Currently and formerly incarcerated students, even those with a high school credential, often lack the crucial literacy and numeracy skills necessary to succeed in college. To address this gap, the PGP launched the College Bridge program that supports incarcerated students who want to acquire the writing, critical thinking and math skills required to access postsecondary programs, and fosters educational self-efficacy and confidence vital for overall personal success. The program was piloted in 2021, and has been operating since 2022.
Science is best taught through hands-on experiments, yet most science curriculums within prisons do not include these learning opportunities. To address the lack of hands-on science education in carceral facilities, we developed STEM Unbarred, a series of monthly hands-on science demonstrations offered to students at the Youth Services Center, a youth correctional facility in DC. The STEM Unbarred Curriculum was created by two PGP volunteers—Anagha Krishnan and Hannah Dada, in collaboration with the PGP staff in the DC Regional Office and the Puttkammer Center. The program has been operating since 2022.