Milwaukee Tech College To Offer Pell Grants To Prisoners

Milwaukee Area Technical College will be one of 67 colleges and universities across the country to pilot a revival of Pell Grants for prisoners. The federal grants pay college costs for low-income students. State and federal inmates have been barred from receiving the support since 1994.

MATC will use the pilot to expand on a re-entry program for prisoners that started in 2015. Earlier this month, 47 inmates had received certificates in computerized machining through the program and 25 were working.

The program’s goal is more than learning specific machining skills, it’s preparing inmates for the workforce, said Trevor Kubatzke, vice president of student services for the campus.

“It’s not just the training in the classroom, it also includes things like, when they’re ready, how do they write a resume? How do we get job skills in there?” he said.

Prisoners who participated in a correctional education program are 43 percent less likely to return to prison within three years than those who do not participate, according to a 2013 study from the RAND Corporation.

The U.S. currently has about 1.5 million inmates, giving it the highest incarceration rate in the world. For every dollar spent on education programs for prisoners, $4 to $5 are saved on three-year reincarceration costs, the RAND Corporation estimates.

The Obama administration’s pilot will make about $30 million in grants available to nearly 12,000 inmates in state and federal facilities in more than 20 states.

The Milwaukee campus plans to enroll 250 grant-supported prisoners in the expanded re-entry program, Kubatzke said.