The Emerson Prison Initiative (EPI) is a college-in-prison program that provides a full Emerson College education and grants degrees to students in the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Concord. Since 2022, EPI has also offered courses in Northeastern Correctional Center, a minimum security facility, which enables students to continue their studies as their status changes. To read more about EPI, visit the Emerson Prison Initiative website.
EPI was founded in 2017, but Emerson faculty worked with incarcerated students as far back as the early 1950s, when Coleman Bender and Haig der Marderosian coached the debate team at Norfolk Prison Colony. This story is explored in the Emerson Archives digital exhibit Emerson's History of Prison Education, which was accompanied for several years by a poster display in Iwasaki Library.
In 2023, EPI and a number of Emerson departments sponsored the Education in Prison Conference, which was held on March 4, 2023. Keynote speaker Reginald Dwayne Betts kicked off a full day of events addressing college in prison from a wide range of perspectives.
Further Reading:
Education Behind the Wall by 
Felon by Watch the Education in Prison Conference:
Reginald Dwayne Betts confronts the funk of postincarceration existence and examines prison not as a static space, but as a force that enacts pressure throughout a person's life. Challenging the complexities of language, Betts animates what it means to be a "felon."
In the searing pages of this classic autobiography, originally published in 1964, Malcolm X, the Muslim leader, firebrand, and anti-integrationist, tells the extraordinary story of his life and the growth of the Black Muslim movement.
The acclaimed Nobel Prize winner challenges our most fiercely held beliefs as she weaves folklore and history, memory and myth into an unforgettable meditation on race, religion, gender, and a far-off past that is ever present—in prose that soars with the rhythms, grandeur, and tragic arc of an epic poem.
A revised edition of one of the most influential plays of our time, published with a new foreword by the author. Over the course of its two parts, Millenium Approaches and Perestroika, Angels in America tells a story at times both grounded and fantastical about AIDS and gay life in America.
Set against the tumultuous years of the post-Napoleonic era, Alexandre Dumas's grand historical romance recounts the swashbuckling adventures of Edmond Dantès, a dashing young sailor falsely accused of treason. The story of his long imprisonment, dramatic escape, and carefully wrought revenge offers up a vision of France that has become immortal.
Perhaps no other Shakespearean drama so engulfs its readers in the ruinous journey of surrender to evil as does Macbeth. A timeless tragedy about the nature of ambition, conscience, and the human heart, the play holds a profound grip on the Western imagination.
As I Lay Dying is the harrowing, darkly comic tale of the Bundren family's trek across Mississippi to bury Addie, their wife and mother, as told by each of the family members--including Addie herself.
At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin's early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document. It consists of two "letters," written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism.
In the course of his wanderings from a Southern Negro college to New York's Harlem, an American black man becomes involved in a series of adventures. Introduction explains circumstances under which the book was written. Ellison won the National Book Award for this searing record of a black man's journey through contemporary America.
Homer's epic tale of the Trojan War, in a modern translation and with notes by Barry Powell.
In this work, Foucault suggests that such vaunted reforms as the abolition of torture and the emergence of the modern penitentiary have merely shifted the focus of punishment from the prisoner's body to his soul.
In Black Men, an integral text for anyone with vested interest in building healthy, thriving Black families and communities, Madhubuti takes aim at some of the critical issues facing the African American family. He offers useful, pointed, practical solutions for overcoming these obstacles and challenges.
Change is constant. The world, our bodies, and our minds are in a constant state of flux. They are a stream of ever-mutating, emergent patterns. Rather than steel ourselves against such change, Emergent Strategy teaches us to map and assess the swirling structures and to read them as they happen, all the better to shape that which ultimately shapes us, personally and politically.
In Womanish, McLarin explores how being both black and female - not to mention middle-aged - complicates everything from dating to parenting to mental health to race relations, and how one woman responds to those challenges. Powerful and timely, McLarin's essays draw upon a lifetime of experiences to paint a personal and societal portrait of what it means to be black and female in contemporary America.
A collection of Jackson's letters from prison, Soledad Brother is an outspoken condemnation of the racism of white America and a powerful appraisal of the prison system that failed to break his spirit but eventually took his life. Jackson's letters make palpable the intense feelings of anger and rebellion that filled black men in America's prisons in the 1960s.
Blood In My Eye captures the spirit of George Jackson's legendary resistance to unbridled oppression and racism. His unique and incisively critical perspective becomes the unifying thread that ties together this collection of letters and essays in which he presents his analysis of armed struggle, class war, fascism, communism, and a wide array of other topics.
The Cross of Redemption by 
College Behind Bars by 