Rueben Little stands outside his classroom, patiently waiting for history class to begin.

The classroom is adorned with timeline posters of civil rights movements and dates chronicling the World Wars. Encyclopedias and world atlas books are situated on the shelves.

Bryson Pope/Campus Echo

Professor Jim Harper

Little, 20, is a post-secondary education student. He has a syllabus, homework and exams. He accumulates credit hours just like any other college student. For Little, class usually ends about an hour just before lockdown.

“The more knowledge you get the more doors open for you,” Little said.

But Little does not take these classes on a traditional college campus. He takes them at a correctional facility.

Little, a High Point native, was a 15-year old ninth grader when he was arrested on drug-related charges and has been serving time for the last five years. He takes courses through the Youth Offenders Program at Polk Youth Institution in Butner.

In its 10th year, the program was formed through an agreement between the North Carolina Department of Corrections and the University of North Carolina System. It was created to give inmates the opportunity to take college-level courses and receive transferrable college credits while serving time in a correctional facility.

NCCU associate history professor Jim Harper started teaching U.S. history last semester at Polk. He said teaching those like Little is an “opportunity” to help incarcerated males.

“I try to help these young men get a new start in life,” Harper said. “Education is one of the things I use to help them better themselves.”

When first presented with the idea to teach at Polk, Harper said he had no qualms about it but the safety issue crossed his mind.

“I didn’t know what kind of level of security it would be,” he said.

He said aside from the prison experience itself, education is an added alternative that motivates inmates to not return to Polk.

“This program is a good program to help these men to transition back to society,” said Harper, who plans on continuing to teach at Polk.

At Polk, students have class once a week if they are enrolled in one class and twice a week for two classes.

The 15-week semester schedule is similar to one at a traditional college. Students can not exceed two classes per semester. Classes last for three hours with a 15-minute break in between. A typical class size is 15 students.

For the last six years, Paulette Morrison-Danner has served as the program coordinator and student support coordinator for NCCU’s University College. She said when she came on board the program was already implemented and she just picked up from there.

“It’s actually like a partnership; it’s basically like a collaborative effort,” Morrison-Danner said. In addition to targeting incarcerated youth, she said the program was designed “to change lives through education.”

She also said once an inmate is released, the education they received will help them maintain in the outside world.

“You want them to come back productive and definitely changed,” Morrison-Danner said. “I think it’s a well-worth program.”

Morrison-Danner said the grant money that they receive is allocated to books for the classes, tuition for the students, computers, school supplies and pay for the professors. This school year, tuition was only $264.68 per semester. By the close of this semester, the program would have spent about $120,000.

“The program was established to provide post-secondary education,” said Kenneth Phillips, NCDOC director of the Youth Offender Program.

According to Phillips, the program is funded through a federal grant from the U. S. Department of Education that is renewed every three years. For the current three-year period, the NCDOC division of prisons received about $1.5 million that was dispersed to the 16 constituent universities in the school system. Each period the grant amount is contingent upon the prison population.

Based on NCDOC statistics, 48 per cent of inmates that are eligible for the program will be repeat offenders, but the number drops to 18 per cent for those who were involved in the program prior to their release. Phillips said that when the offenders go through the Program their “cognitive and behavioral skills are bettered.”

Shelbia Brown writes for the Campus Echo, the North Carolina Central University student newspaper, which originally published this article.