A multi-university consortium will look to transform the lives of incarcerated people through education.

The MIT Educational Justice Institute will lead a consortium to support expanding access to postsecondary education to people currently and formerly in prison statewide, fueled by a grant by the Vera Institute of Justice (Vera) and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Other member schools include Boston University, Emerson College, Mt. Wachusett Community College, and Tufts University.

In 1987, while teaching a class at MIT on nonviolence, philosophy lecturer Lee Perlman had a novel idea: Why not take the students to a prison, to talk with men who had committed extreme forms of violence?