Joyce Fernandez
Ed.D. ’25
New Study Documents Both Opportunity and Barriers in California Prison Education Programs
Through interviews with incarcerated students, faculty, and program leaders, a researcher examines what supports—and disrupts—college success in prison
As higher education opportunities expand inside California prisons, Joyce Fernandez, Ed.D. ’25, is examining the experiences of incarcerated students pursuing college degrees—and the institutional conditions that shape their ability to succeed.
The only School of Education student—and one of few UC Davis graduate students in recent years—to conduct research inside California prisons, Fernandez interviewed incarcerated students pursuing associate degrees. Her dissertation focuses on how prison education programs can better support student learning, persistence, and long-term educational success.
Central to Fernandez’s work is the idea that incarcerated students themselves should be included in conversations about prison education policy and program development. “With college education programs increasing in California’s state prisons,” Fernandez writes, “it is imperative that academic institutions assess the various programs offered and speak to incarcerated students about their experiences.”
That perspective reflects a broader gap in existing research, which focuses on formerly incarcerated individuals rather than students who are currently navigating prison education programs. “There’s very little literature on the motivations and challenges of the currently incarcerated, most is from people who were formerly incarcerated,” Fernandez said. “But for incarcerated people, prison is often the starting point of their educational journeys. We need to understand what that experience looks like to actually support them.”
Education as Purpose and Possibility
To better understand those experiences, Fernandez interviewed five incarcerated students of varying ages, ethnicities, and sentence lengths about their educational journeys. Participants described education as a source of purpose and confidence, as well as a way to reconnect with family and envision a different future. “Every single day when I get back from work or school, I get to call my mom and let her know how it’s going,” one participant shared. “It makes them [my parents] happy, which makes me happy. And it makes this all so much easier to deal with. I’ve got purpose now. Education is my purpose.”
Students also described the confidence and agency they gained through higher education. “I think one of the huge benefits of college, and that I have gotten, was a confidence that I can do anything that I want to set my mind to,” a participant explained. “There’s nothing that I can’t accomplish.”
At the same time, Fernandez’s research found that access to prison education alone does not guarantee that students are able to persist and succeed. Participants described systemic barriers that repeatedly disrupted their academic progress, including course cancellations, limited access to instructors and counseling faculty, loud study environments, delayed course materials, and prejudice from prison staff and peers. Among the most significant obstacles were prison transfers. In some cases, students who were moved between facilities lost credit for completed coursework and were forced to restart at a new location, if that was an option at all.
Studying Prison Education From the Inside
Taken together, these findings point to the importance of evaluating prison education programs by students’ ability to meaningfully participate in and complete their coursework, not just enrollment numbers.
Fernandez’s work also highlights why research on prison education remains limited. Her dissertation took substantially longer to conduct than expected because of the lengthy approval processes required to work inside correctional facilities. “Considering the bureaucracy to enter a secure and confidential facility,” she writes, “along with the vulnerability of such a population, it is not surprising data is lacking.”
Fernandez hopes her work will encourage more researchers, educators, and policymakers to engage directly with incarcerated students and allow their experiences to shape future programming. “All the participants spoke about their enhanced and wider worldview that came with education, to see the world as larger than their current circumstances,” Fernandez said. “And that is what we as a society need to do too. We, as a collective, have to do better.”
