Nearly 7,000 people living in Utah have almost no access to a university-level education.
The men and women serving prison sentences in the Utah State Prison make up a small percentage of the more than 2.3 million inmates across the United States, many of whom have not had the opportunity to be educated at a university.
A new program at the U will be providing lectures to inmates beginning Tuesday, Dec. 9, from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Utah State Prison in Draper. The U has already begun a science program at the Salt Lake County Jail and will now partner with the Utah Department of Corrections to support the monthly lecture series.
Craig Burr, director for the Division of Programming, said in the program’s press release, “The Utah Department of Corrections is excited about this new partnership because we’ve always been supportive of educational opportunities for our offenders.”
The opening lecture Tuesday night will feature Nalini Nadkarni, a professor of biology at the U, who said she is excited to participate.
“These programs both benefit inmates and provide an opportunity for U scientists to connect with the community, creating a synergistic interaction between our institutions,” Nadkarni said.
Nadkarni said she will discuss the relationships between humans and trees both in Utah and around the world. Nadkarni said she has done research on rainforest canopies and will be speaking about her research and providing information about professions in forest science.
The Initiative to Bring Science Programs to the Incarcerated, or INSPIRE, is funded by the National Science Foundation.
The project’s mission, according to the press release, is to inspire interest in and provide content about science for incarcerated men and women in Utah. Nadkarni said this will contribute to a more educated society with people who can make better decisions and live more productive lives.
The program is modeled after a project Nadkarni co-founded in 2005 called the Sustainability in Prisons Project, which brought education about science and sustainability into prisons in Washington. It has since expanded to eight additional sites across the U.S.
“This [will be] a monthly event,” Nadkarni said, “Each month, a faculty member or graduate student from one of the four departments in the College of Science will give a lecture at Draper State Prison. Our focus at this point is on science, but we also foresee opening the topics to sustainability, engineering and technology in the future.”
Gaining an education is an important goal, Nadkarni said.
“What matters is cultivating a respect for the scientific way of knowing and thinking — in addition to other pathways of understanding the world,” she said. “Our science lecture series for inmates is one way of helping those who might not have any other pathway to science to begin or continue on it. It might lead to a desire for more education, a means to enter the workforce after release, or just more understanding about the world.”
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