Since the killing of George Floyd, issues centered around law enforcement have been put in the spotlight, thrust front and center. Protesters have all but begged those in charge — or able to effect change — to at least concede that there may be a problem, and therefore a need for reform. Buildings have burned, lives have been lost, and some cities have reduced funding to their police departments.

But we seem to have forgotten that the same toxicity and systemic racism that drives acts of violence and inequity by police can be found in every other level of the criminal justice system. Any conversation about reform that excludes the people bearing the consequences of arrest and imprisonment would be incomplete, and therefore unproductive. As an incarcerated individual (I am serving a 12-year sentence for robbery) with a stake in the topic, I worked with some of my neighbors to form a prisoner-led organization, operating in the Monroe Correctional Complex in Washington state, to isolate certain inequities within the prison system and help bridge them to achieve true recidivism-reducing reform.

Individuals who participate in educational programming while incarcerated are 43 percent less likely to return to prison, that makes education the most powerful rehabilitative tool a prisoner can embrace. However, until recently, none of the classes offered at MCC were taught in Spanish, despite the fact that prisoners of Hispanic origin make up 15 percent of Washington’s incarcerated population, according to  the state’s Department of Corrections. (People of Hispanic origin are overrepresented in Washington prisons; only 12 percent of the state’s population is Hispanic.)

The English-only courses offered were also useless for those being deported to Latin American countries upon release. After deportation, with no support, education or job skills, felons sometimes return to the United States, where their families reside, and can then be charged with new felonies for doing so. Seeing a need to balance the scales, in 2016, several members of Monroe’s 70-year-old Hispanic Culture Group, myself included, formed an organization aimed at creating educational opportunities for a demographic that seemed forgotten by everybody else.

Read the full article about prison education reform by Michael J. Moore at The Hechinger Report.