Category: News

This week the first 50 copies of our new LEAP packets (Learning, Engagement, and Activities Packets) have been distributed in special housing units at the Oregon State Penitentiary.

The packets include essays, short stories, poems, activities, and artwork. They also include writing prompts throughout the packet, inviting readers to respond to the parts that interest them. Our LEAP coordinator will give feedback to everyone who writes responses to the packet.

We will be collecting feedback and integrating the things we learn into future volumes as we expand our participants to folks in other special housing and isolated circumstances statewide.

Our second season of UO PEP TV has been sent out to institutions statewide – sending an engaging and diverse set of content inside to an audience of up to 14,000 incarcerated folks. We have built on our initial partnership with the UO’s Oregon Humanities Center to now also feature content from the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art and the Wayne Morse Center.

People incarcerated in Oregon prisons have no internet access. It is very difficult for folks to learn about events and issues in a deep way – either topics on the current nightly news or to pursue the kind of intellectual curiosity that leads to enriching research and engagement with new ideas. We are hopeful that PEP TV will help us engage with those exact needs, and offer an intellectual and psychological space for learning and engagement – including for folks incarcerated in hard-to-reach rural areas who have even less access to programs.

Our PEP TV curator, Josh Cain, has selected a diverse range of topics and talks that include topics as diverse as the ethical and economic implications of the Covid pandemic to the neuroscience of memory, artist talks, civic engagement, social media, Oregon’s history in relation to its Black citizens, and an in-depth examination of a museum special exhibition on football in American art. With each selection we hope to speak to new and different perspectives, interests, identities, and questions.

We are extremely grateful for the support of the Lundquist College of Business for helping with video editing and DVD authoring.

[embeddoc url=”https://prisoned.uoregon.edu/files/2021/07/UO-PEP-TV-S2-Guide-.pdf” download=”all” viewer=”google”]

Thanks to the generosity of 53 alumni and friends, we raised more than $17,000 during Ducks Give in support of our program. This was the first time the PEP was featured by the UO in this annual online fundraising effort, and we are thrilled with the community’s response.

Our program was part of an enormous effort across the UO to support programs for our campus and community. The best part of the day for us was seeing some familiar names on our donors list – we received support from Inside-Out alumni, family members, faculty members, and campus officials who have attended past events.

Donations like these help us continue to innovate and sustain our work. Thank you to everyone who supported us on Ducks Give!

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Gifts of all sizes are welcome and make a difference. If you’d like to support our programming immediately, click here for our donation portal. If you’re curious about other methods of giving, contact our development director, Margaret Savoian at 541-556-7781 or msavoian@uoregon.edu.

We could not be more delighted to announce that we have received a grant from the Mellon Foundation to deepen and expand our work. In the midst of covid and the many accompanying uncertainties, this grant is more welcome even than it would have been in “normal” times. The funding will allow us to expand our course offerings in the Humanities, as well as develop a project to send reading materials to folks in special housing units and to provide educational TV programming statewide.

The Mellon Foundation has been a staunch supporter of prison education efforts, and we are honored to be part of their work.

Read more in Around the O!

We are proud to announce that our new project, UO PEP TV has launched! DVDs were sent to all 14 institutions around Oregon, with a request to play the content over the institutional education chanel. That means there is a potential audience of 14,000 people who will be able to watch these guest lecturers from past UO events.

The content was carefully chosen by our PEP TV Content Curator, Josh Cain, who is one of our former inside members of ACE and a graduate of the UO while inside. He chose talks on a variety of topics, which we hope will capture the interest of a broad range of folks on the inside. The current “Season” has two hours of content each week for 10 weeks, and we hope to expand in the future. All lectures are drawn from the UO Humanities Center, and we are grateful for their support and participation.

[embeddoc url=”https://prisoned.uoregon.edu/files/2021/06/UO-PEP-TV-Season-1-TV-Guide.pdf” download=”all” viewer=”google”]

The University of Oregon’s Prison Education Program stands against racism in all its forms – overt, unconscious, and systemic. We are committed to combating inequality and violence through conversations in our classes, our projects, and among ourselves.

We stand in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, recognizing the unequal violence and structural hardships faced by our Black students, neighbors, colleagues, and leaders.

We hope that in this moment greater equality can be achieved for all those who suffer discrimination and prejudice. We commit to being present in that fight.

One of the inspirations for Inside-Out’s pedagogy, Paolo Freire, uses the analogy that “we make the road by walking.” We as a society are making that way forward now – through protests in the streets, independent study, tough conversations, and interruption of violence and discrimination. We commit to continuing in that work – to use another quote that frequently appears in our programmatic conversations, “once you know, you owe.” The existence and impact of systemic racism is not new news to us, and we recommit ourselves to the ongoing work of social justice through education and dialogue.

Inside-Out courses and all in-person PEP programs have been suspended for the duration of the State-mandated social distancing due to the pandemic. When we are allowed to return to work inside, we will as soon as possible.

We are delighted to announce the commencement celebration for three of our inside students at OSCI: Shawn, Kevin, and Mark.

Throughout the spring of 2019, the Prison Education Program is exhibiting work by students and artists inside Oregon’s prisons on the University of Oregon campus. The exhibition, Emergence: Art from Inside, features work by twenty artists incarcerated at Oregon State Penitentiary and Oregon State Correctional Institution – both in Salem, Oregon – and youth from the Serbu Youth Detention Center in Eugene. The exhibition is a collaboration between the Visual Arts Team and the UO Prison Education Program.

Some artists represented in Emergence have taken many classes through UO’s programming inside these institutions, while others have not. The goal of bringing these pieces together is to offer a venue for the work and talent of incarcerated artists to emerge into a space of higher education. Likewise, to offer a glimpse into the common threads and variations emergent across work being created inside, with an opportunity for incarcerated artists to describe what art making means to them.

Emergence will be on view throughout spring term in the Erb Memorial Union’s Adell McMillan Gallery (1395 University St, Eugene). Join us for an opening reception on Thursday, April 18th from 6-7pm. Light refreshments will be served.