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Hogan is a doctoral student in computer science at UC San Diego and lives in Santee.

This fall will be my third time teaching introductory computer science inside Richard J. Donovan Correctional Center to a new cohort of UC Irvine students. I began my doctorate degree in the Computing Education lab at UC San Diego in fall 2021 knowing that I wanted to study how to improve computing education in prisons. With the support of my three advisers, I secured the opportunity to teach with LIFTED for the first time in fall 2022.

I receive a fair amount of skepticism from computing academics when I introduce my research (i.e., can they really learn to code?), especially after revealing the severity of the technology restrictions. So far, I have found the answer to be largely positive. However, I believe it is yet to be understood the degree of grit, resourcefulness and brilliance it takes for my students to succeed despite incredible barriers.

One of the most significant challenges for computing specifically is that students are not able to run code on their prison-issued laptops. Much of my work thus far has been developing and documenting strategies some of them entirely created by the students to simulate and supplement the critical learning for novice programmers that happens in the trial-and-error process of running code, identifying errors and fixing them. With these strategies, along with the unique assets students bring to the classroom, many students are able to achieve similar levels of proficiency to students in introductory programming courses on main campus with wildly different access to all types of resources.

However, as power and resources in our society are increasingly concentrated with those in control of our technology, structural changes will need to take place in order to truly expand the pool of those trained with computing expertise to include those impacted by incarceration and the marginalized populations they overrepresent. While higher education in prison programs have grown in recent years, there are currently no computer science degrees offered. Reasons for this include restricted access to critical technology inside, but also the difficulty college-in-prison programs face in recruiting computer science faculty. This is, at least in part, because computer science professors are currently experiencing greater demand on main campuses, and consequently require higher pay to temporarily replace them (e.g., to afford a lecturer to cover for a faculty member teaching in prison). While a short-term solution could be having graduate students (like myself) teach the computer science courses in the prison, this would create a lower standard of quality in the prison than on main campuses. If students earn the same degree in prison as on main campuses, this cannot be. At the same time, offering only the less in-demand, and therefore more affordable, areas of study in prison reproduces inequity by excluding the incarcerated students from currently more popular or lucrative majors.

Research shows that every dollar invested in correctional education returns $4-$5 in savings of taxpayer dollars, as people leaving prison have the skills needed to succeed instead of returning to prison. Therefore, I believe the necessary long-term solution should include government funding specifically to offer science, technology, engineering and mathematics degrees in prison, building on existing policies supported by Gov. Gavin Newsom in the past, such as incentivizing community colleges to offer degrees in California prisons. In addition, building educational technology infrastructure in prisons needs to include critical technologies for STEM disciplines.

Creating access to computing degrees in higher education in prison programs such as LIFTED, and pipelines to careers in technology, is a necessary step towards equity in technology, higher education and the criminal justice system. Despite ongoing narratives about science-related fields being objective and neutral, the benefits and harms of current technology in our society are undeniably biased. In recent examples, machine-learning algorithms incorporated into sentencing procedures were shown to be racially biased, and facial recognition technology used in policing is less accurate for people of color. It is no coincidence that technology innovations in our society continue to fail people from racial groups overrepresented in our prison population. I believe that meaningful progress towards equity in computing higher education and our criminal justice system are similarly stagnated as long as we continue to block access to computing higher education pathways in prison.

Originally posted here:

Opinion: Teaching computer science in the prison has been a challenging and rewarding experience - The San Diego Union-Tribune