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Phi Theta Kappa Honors in Action

A research guide for the Honors in Action project completed by members of Phi Theta Kappa.

Prison education

(Based on Honors Study Topic To the Seventh Generation: Inheritance and Legacy)

Research question: "To what degree should the government fund education for inmates, and how can access of education in prison be improved within the next decade?"

To target government websites (for statistics or government-funded studies), add site:.gov to your Google search.
Try the Directory of Open Access Journals for peer-reviewed articles freely available online: https://doaj.org/
If RVCC does not have access to full text of a needed article, use Interlibrary Loan to get it. Ask Janelle or another librarian if you need help.
Search the Internet, use Wikipedia, or utilize one of the library's Research Starter databases to learn more about your topic and look for synonyms and related terms to use in your searches.
Keywords to try/combine to create complex searches (presented in alphabetical order, not ranked by usefulness):
- Agency
- Allocation
- Alternative
- Arrest
- "Associate's Degree"
- "Bachelor's Degree"
- Barrier
- Bias
- Budget
- Certificate
- Chaplain
- College
- Compulsory
- Convict
- Correction
- Correspondance
- Cost
- Coursework
- Criminal
- "Criminal Justice"
- Decriminalization
- Degree
- Diploma
- Disparity
- "Distance Education"
- Education
- Eliminate
- Employment
- Ethic* [will search for ethics, ethical, and anything that starts with that root]
- Fees
- "Financial Aid"
- Fine
- "First Step Act (FSA) of 2018"
- Funding
- Gender
- "Higher Education"
- Housing
- Imprison
- Incarceration
- Incentive
- Inmate
- Jail
- "Job Skills"
- Jurisdiction
- Justice
- Juvenile
- "Law Enforcement"
- Lesson
- "Life Sentence"
- "Life Skills"
- Literacy
- Low-Income
- Mandatory
- "Mass Criminalization"
- "Mass Incarceration"
- Motivation
- Nonviolent
- Numeracy
- Opposition
- Overcriminalization
- Overcrowding
- "Pell Grant"
- "Penal System"
- Penitentiary
- Personnel
- Possession
- Prison
- "Prison Libraries"
- Probation
- Psycholog* [will search for psychology, psychological, and anything that starts with that root]
- "Public Defender"
- Punishment
- Race
- Recidivism
- Regulation
- Reentry
- Reduction
- Reform
- Reinstate
- Rehabilitation
- Religious
- Schooling
- "Secondary Education"
- Secular
- Secure
- Sentence
- Sociolog* [will search for sociology, sociological, and anything that starts with that root]
- "Staff Shortage"
- Support
- Systemic
- Tax
- "Tertiary Education"
- Tuition
- University
- Violent
- Vocational
- "War on Drugs"
- Zero-Tolerance

Recommended databases:

(Some of these may provide scholarly articles while others offer reference articles or popular sources. If you are not sure what kind of source you found, please ask Janelle or another librarian!)

Academic OneFile This link opens in a new window
A multidisciplinary Gale database with the majority of content from full-text, scholarly journals.
Academic OneFile has indexing of over 13,000 journals covering multiple research subjects including the physical sciences, business, technology, medicine, social sciences, the arts, theology, and literature. The majority of the journals are peer reviewed and many articles are available in full-text. This database includes full-text for many cited articles in CINAHL and ERIC plus includes podcasts and transcripts from NPR, CNN and CBC. It also includes key, scholarly journals published in Spanish and other languages.
Academic Search Premier This link opens in a new window
A multidisciplinary EBSCO database offering scholarly and non-scholarly material on a wide variety of subjects.
Subjects include major science disciplines such as biology, chemistry, and physics as well as engineering, psychology, religion and philosophy. It provides access to full text content for many scholarly journals, citations/abstracts for more than 1,000 titles and access to more than 60,000 videos from the Associated Press.
Criminal Justice Collection (Gale) This link opens in a new window
A Gale database of more than 700 full-text journals for paralegal and law research. A great source for forensic science, paralegal studies, sociology and law enforcement.
Criminal Justice Database (ProQuest) This link opens in a new window
This is a ProQuest database supporting research on crime, its causes and impacts, legal and social implications, as well as litigation and crime trends.
Ideal for research in the areas of criminology, criminal justice, law enforcement, corrections, and drug enforcement. It contains a combination of full-text and abstracts from books, dissertations & theses, magazines, reports, scholarly journals, trade journals, and working papers.
Education Database This link opens in a new window
This is a ProQuest database which includes over 1,000 full-text journals and 18,000 dissertations, supporting research on the theory and practice of education.
This database covers not only the literature on primary, secondary, and higher education but also special education, home schooling, early childhood education, and adult education. Approximately 75% of the publications included in this database are scholarly journals. The majority of the content spans from 1980-present, but there are earlier documents and articles included. Use this database in conjunction with ERIC for comprehensive education research and full-text access to some articles only cited in ERIC.
ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center) This link opens in a new window
ERIC (Education Resources Information Center) is an authoritative database of indexed and full-text education literature and resources supported by the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Educational Research and Improvement and is administered by the U.S. National Library of Education (NLE).
It contains more than 1.6 million records and links to hundreds of thousands of full-text documents including journal articles (most of which are scholarly), books, conference papers, curriculum guides, policy papers and more. Through the EBSCO interface, it provides an education-specific thesaurus that includes controlled vocabulary.
Opposing Viewpoints in Context This link opens in a new window
This Gale database provides information covering today's hottest social issues. It contains pro/con viewpoints, magazine & newspaper articles, scholarly journal articles, reference articles, and more.
This Gale resource provides more than 20,100 pro/con viewpoints covering today’s hottest social issues and more than 19,200 reference articles, including topic overviews, charts and graphs, and statistical information. It contains over 300 profiles of federal agencies and special-interest groups and offers a dedicated portal focused on the annual debate topic determined by the National Speech and Debate Association. It provides access to full-text newspapers and periodicals from multiple perspectives, including National Review, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Commentary, and CNN Wire. This is a great resource for background research on topics to gain different perspectives.
Proquest Central This link opens in a new window
A multidisciplinary database that provides access to ProQuest databases across all major subject areas.
Subjects include business, health and medical, social sciences, arts and humanities, education, science and technology, and religion. The collection includes thousands of full-text scholarly journals, books, newspapers, magazines, conference papers and proceedings, dissertations and theses, working papers, blogs, podcasts, websites, tables, trade journals, wire feeds, video and audio resources. Some articles have citation information only.
ScienceDirect This link opens in a new window
This Elsevier database provides mostly full-text access to over 14 million scientific, technical and health publications from over 3,800 journals and more than 35,000 books.
Some articles have citation and abstract information only. This is a good source for scholarly articles in nursing, psychology and the sciences.
Social Science Database This link opens in a new window
A ProQuest database that offers indexing and full-text for hundreds of academic scholarly journals covering a wide range of social science disciplines including anthropology, criminology, economics, education, political science, psychology, social work, and sociology.
Helpful to students studying nursing, criminal justice and the social sciences.
SocIndex This link opens in a new window
This EBSCO database provides comprehensive coverage of sociology, encompassing all sub-disciplines and closely related areas of study.
It features millions of records with subject headings from a sociological thesaurus. It provides mostly full-text access to scholarly journals, as well as indexing for books, monographs, conference papers and other non-periodical materials. It also provides over 25,000 author profiles on the most prolific, most cited and most frequently searched for authors in the database.

Web resources

Many of these are not scholarly sources, but they may give you new ideas and keywords.

Alliance for Higher Education in Prison
The Alliance and its stakeholders believe all people, regardless of whether or not they are currently or formerly incarcerated, should have access to high-quality and free higher education. They work collaboratively to advance the field of higher education in prison by supporting practitioners and students, producing reliable data and research, and communicating the need, importance, and value of quality higher education in prison.
Bureau of Justice Statistics
"BJS is the primary statistical agency of the Department of Justice... The mission of BJS is to collect, analyze, publish, and disseminate information on crime, criminal offenders, victims of crime, and the operation of justice systems at all levels of government."
Federal Bureau of Prisons
The BOP ensures the security of federal prisons and provide inmates with programs and services that model mainstream values. They provides a myriad of inmate programs to address criminogenic needs.
Prisoner Learning Alliance
The Prisoner Learning Alliance (PLA) is a network of organizations and individuals with expertise, experience and an interest in prison education. With a shared vision of learning opportunities which enable personal and professional transformation, they work together to influence prison education policy across England and Wales.
Prisoners' Education Trust
PET has a 30-year history working in prisons, beginning in HMP Wandsworth in 1989 and expanding to cover every prison in England and Wales. They fund courses in levels and subjects that are otherwise unavailable, support people to choose courses, build connections and progress with their learning, and champion the life-changing power of education to prisons and policy makers.
Prison Policy Initiative
"The non-profit, non-partisan Prison Policy Initiative produces cutting edge research to expose the broader harm of mass criminalization, and then sparks advocacy campaigns to create a more just society."
US Department of Justice