Graduates from the second LIFTED cohort celebrate at their June 18 ceremony
  • May 21, 2026

  • UC Irvine LIFTED leaders, featured in ASA Footnotes, reflect on the program’s early successes and transformative impacts on its human participants

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“In 2023, Congress restored Pell Grant eligibility to incarcerated students. This opened new opportunities for higher education in U.S. prisons and amplified work already underway in a few states, such as California, to seed state-funded college programs. This reinstatement followed on the heels of the COVID-19 pandemic, which had seen sharp increases in mortality (much larger than those found in the general population) and an exodus of staff, devastating prisons across the United States.

Building and sustaining higher education programs in prison in this post-COVID context is particularly challenging, as the University of California-Irvine’s LIFTED (Leveraging Inspiring Futures Through Educational Degrees) program, which offers a bachelor’s degree in sociology to incarcerated Californians, proves. Although we launched virtually in 2020, COVID delayed our actual admission and beginning of face-to-face classes until 2022. We only qualified (as one of the first) Pell-eligible prison programs in the United States in 2024, just as our first cohort completed their bachelor’s degrees. COVID, however, is not the only crisis facing efforts such as LIFTED’s to expand higher education opportunities.

Now having graduated its first two cohorts, in 2024 and 2025, we pause to reflect on the program’s early successes and transformative impacts on its human participants—especially students and faculty—and organizational partners—a state prison and university. The program demonstrates the value of community-facing work in a time of social and political uncertainty.”

Read in full, courtesy of ASA Footnotes.

UC Irvine Authors:
David John Frank, Professor | Richard Arum, Professor | Keramet Reiter, Professor | Carroll Seron, Professor Emerita | Judith Stepan-Norris, Professor Emerita | Taylor Michelle Wycoff, Ph.D. Candidate

 

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