For Incarcerated Students in California, Education Is a Collective Endeavor

Kenneth Butler, an inside-outside prison education training coach who grew up in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, spent 15 years incarcerated prior to his release from prison in June 2021. He’s since implemented reentry programs and conducted recidivism research in Uganda while on a Fulbright Fellowship, and he has served as a mentor to formerly incarcerated youth and young adults in Southern California.

Before all that, Butler was part of the incarcerated cohort that came up with the idea of starting a B.A. program through Pitzer College inside the California Rehabilitation Center (CRC), a men’s state prison in Norco, California.

Butler, who is also a graduate of Norco College’s prison education program — known now as the Rising Scholars Program — told me in an interview earlier t