On Jan. 11, the Georgetown University Prisons and Justice Initiative (PJI) released its annual report, which detailed a year of exoneration, education and expansion.

Established in 2016 to provide an avenue for Georgetown University faculty and students to tackle the complexities of mass incarceration, PJI is currently the leading provider of education for both current and former incarcerated individuals.

2023 marked a year of achievement and growth for the program. PJI opened a new facility in downtown Washington, D.C. to accommodate its growing team, was highlighted in People magazine and continued its mission of involving the Georgetown community in the crisis posed by mass incarceration in America.

Marc Howard (LAW ‘12), founding director of PJI and a government and law professor at Georgetown, said the initiative has grown rapidly in the past eight years.

“We started as a very small team trying to engage the Georgetown community in criminal legal reform issues, and we’ve grown to become a real model for how universities can serve people impacted by incarceration,” Howard wrote to The Hoya.

This year, its Prison Scholars Program, in which Georgetown faculty teach classes to incarcerated individuals at the D.C. Jail, celebrated the completion of 357 credits by its 45 students. 

PJI also continued its second year with its Bachelor of Liberal Arts program. This program offers incarcerated inmates in Maryland the opportunity to receive a fully accredited Bachelor of Liberal Arts from Georgetown University. The program hopes to enroll 125 students in the next five years, and in 2023, it reached the halfway point toward this goal with 67 students enrolled. 

In addition to its education opportunities for currently incarcerated individuals, the PJI provides a host of reentry services for individuals leaving the prison system, including the Georgetown Pivot Program, which seeks to provide vocational and career-oriented training for previously incarcerated individuals.

The Pivot Program provides students with classes and internship opportunities and even hosts an annual pitch competition, where participants compete for startup funding. This year, Tyronda Ferrell won the pitch competition for her startup, Pop, Lock n’ Learn, a summer dance program that also provides digital literacy instruction.  

The Pivot Program announced the graduation of 16 participants in 2023, including Ferrell, who upon graduating, joined the PJI team as a full-time administrative coordinator. 

Ferrell said she chose to work for PJI in order to give back to the community and help change outcomes for previously incarcerated individuals.

“ I hope to have more opportunities to speak to previously incarcerated individuals and show them how the Pivot program can help break the stereotype of ‘once incarcerated, always incarcerated.’” Ferrell wrote to The Hoya. “Ultimately, I want to demonstrate to the world that the Pivot program is full of genuine people dedicated to helping returning citizens succeed.”

Katy Ryan, a former professor at West Virginia University specializing in the history of prisons in the United States, joined the initiative in August as its new director of education and said she looks forward to enriching PJI’s current education program with more arts programming.

“We also want to create a writing and arts studio at the prison and jail,” Ryan wrote to The Hoya. “We’d love to collaborate with students on a writing and art collection of their original work.”

Aside from its expansive education program, PJI is also dedicated to working to exonerate wrongly convicted people. 

 The “Making an Exoneree” course and program was founded by Howard and life-long friend Marty Tankleff in 2018, after Tankleff was exonerated after spending nearly 18 years in prison for a crime he did not commit, and it seeks to involve Georgetown students in the fight to reverse wrongful convictions. Each semester, 15 students take an intensive 5-credit course where they work directly with currently incarcerated individuals seeking to terminate their wrongful convictions. 

In 2023, the program celebrated the release of Kenneth Bond, Muti Ajamu-Osagboro and Terrel Barros, who served a combined 80 years after being wrongly convicted. 

PJI Program Associate Arlondo “Tray” Jones III, who was exonerated in 2022 after serving 37 years in prison, expressed his pride in this year’s exonerees and hopes that the “Making an Exoneree” program continues to thrive in 2024. 

“I would love to walk one of this year’s wrongfully convicted Making An Exoneree participants out of prison,” Jones wrote to The Hoya. “My dream would be to see all five walk free!”

Ryan said PJI’s programs constantly face challenges, but that a common commitment to the initiative’s mission continuously drives its team to work to surmount them.

“There is nothing easy about this work,” Ryan said. “Every day I watch coworkers confront obstacles and respond with such creativity and determination. There is a sense of shared purpose at PJI and a daily willingness to dig deeper to ensure people have access to education while in prison and meaningful support when released.”