Researchers and advocates face persistent challenges when gathering and reporting data from institutions that serve incarcerated students, which create significant barriers to understanding postsecondary program impact, ensuring accountability, and advancing effective policy. Inconsistent, incomplete, or inaccessible data makes it difficult to assess whether incarcerated learners receive equitable educational opportunities, obscures our understanding of their educational pathways, and limits our ability to identify disparities or areas in need of improvement. These data limitations weaken advocacy efforts, hinder coordination between colleges and correctional facilities, and ultimately reinforce existing inequities, especially for a student population that is also disproportionately Black, Latine, and low-income. Structural factors such as fragmented data systems, varied reporting practices, and limited staff capacity, further compound these challenges, slowing progress toward statewide goals to expand high-quality college-in-prison programs, support reentry, and reduce recidivism.
The purpose of this memo is to nuance the conversation about data collection for incarcerated students. In this memo, we outline how Research for Action (RFA) has approached identifying carceral enrollments in the California community colleges, and the challenges we encountered through this process. Specifically, we identified seven data challenges and show how these challenges might impact analytic goals. We have learned through this work that this data collection is not straightforward, and that obtaining reliable estimates for enrollment and completion among this population is more difficult than one might expect. We hope that through our efforts, researchers studying incarcerated students may anticipate such challenges and traverse the landscape with more transparency.
