Mountjoy Prisoners Gain Access To Third-Level Education During Pandemic

Irish Times - Prisoners at Mountjoy Prison have been granted online access to college lectures and tutorials during the coronavirus pandemic and this could be instrumental in establishing third-level education in Irish prisons in the longer term, a review of a new project involving the Dublin jail and Maynooth University has concluded.

Conor Lally

The access to courses at Maynooth granted to prisoners could “bring the university into the prison and the prison into the university in ways we could never have previously imagined”, a review of the scheme by Sarah Meaney of the College Connect programme, which aims to increase diversity, in third level has found.

It concluded the project resulted in the prisoners reflecting on their lives in a meaningful way and also made third-level education seem more attainable for them as they learned the college students were often from similar backgrounds as themselves.

Lack of confidence

“One of the key barriers for young working-class men to educational progression, is a lack of confidence that university life is for them,” Ms Meaney concluded in her review.

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