Community Engagement

Our approach to service learning conceives of the prison as a community, rich with possibilities for our students to apply new knowledge to affect positive change within the prison walls. Service learning also offers our incarcerated students meaningful ways to engage with our campus and local communities through non-profits like WordsUncaged and embeds community-engaged restorative justice practices into the curriculums of our PGI students and those on the main campus.

All PGI students in our bachelor’s programs at Los Angeles County Prison (LAC), California Institution for Women (CIW), and California Institution for Men (CIM) are required to take at least one service-learning class as part of their roadmap to graduation in both BA program offerings: Communication Studies and Liberal Studies. Our approach to community engagement connects with our career-engaged curriculum, explicitly showing students how skills learned in the major are transferrable to community and career settings via our in-person career and academic skills tutoring center. This approach aims to help students understand how community engagement deepens learning and helps prepare them for the workforce. It also provides ways through which our incarcerated students can meaningfully belong to our campus community through collaborative projects with students on our main campus, as well as reconnect with the communities that they have been separated from while incarcerated. In addition, it allows our students to build their networks of contacts in the non-profit sector and increases their career opportunities upon release from prison.