In 2023, incarcerated students in the U.S. became eligible for federal Pell grants to fund higher education.
Most bachelor?s and associate degree (A.S.) programs require at least one science-with-laboratory course.
Correctional centers have stringent restrictions on the types of materials that can be brought into the facilities, and
many also have limited technology access, which combine to make lab instruction challenging. We have developed
a non-majors biology course that satisfies the laboratory science general education requirement for an A.S. in
general studies at Piedmont Virginia Community College which transfers to most 4-year institutions in Virginia.
Materials used in the labs have been approved for use at several Virginia correctional facilities of varying security
levels. These materials include an open-source lab manual, a student laboratory kit in a plastic shoebox, and some
shared classroom materials such as micropipettes and microscopes. Where prohibitions on materials make
equivalent labs in the correctional centers difficult, we have paired the incarcerated students? hypothesis
generation and protocol design with photographic data from previously conducted on-campus experiments.
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