Sixteen women incarcerated at the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women in St. Gabriel walked across a makeshift stage this week to collect bachelor's degrees from Tulane University, capping a partnership that has now pushed 29 women through the same college program since 2025. The graduates received their diplomas during a ceremony held right at the correctional facility, trading prison uniforms for caps and gowns for an afternoon.
According to New Orleans CityBusiness, the program is a joint effort between Tulane University's School of Professional Advancement and Operation Restoration, a New Orleans-based nonprofit founded in 2016 that focuses on education, economic mobility and advocacy for women and girls affected by incarceration. Olivia Matte, chosen as the class valedictorian, delivered the commencement address at the ceremony. Organizers describe the effort as Louisiana's first in-person, secular higher-education program for incarcerated women, offering bachelor's degrees in social sciences.
The College-In-Prison program has operated as an accredited Tulane satellite campus since 2024, and its first graduating class produced 13 students in 2025. Behind the scenes, Tulane's School of Professional Advancement manages admissions, builds and delivers the curriculum, and provides academic and faculty oversight, according to Tulane's School of Professional Advancement. Operation Restoration, meanwhile, handles wraparound student support, fundraising and operational logistics for the women enrolled. Earning the degree requires completing 120 course hours, the same standard that applies to any Tulane undergraduate.
One Graduate's 26-Year Path to a Diploma
Among this year's graduates is Deidre Thomas, who spent nearly 26 years incarcerated before continuing her education. While inside, Thomas served as a counsel substitute, assisting other incarcerated women with their legal cases, work that is now steering her next move: the article notes she is pursuing a second degree in general legal studies at Tulane along with a paralegal certification, and she now works at the Promise of Justice Initiative in New Orleans.
Marko Salvaggio, program director for Tulane's School of Professional Advancement, said the program supports students' academic and professional goals while bringing varied perspectives into classroom discussions, per the same CityBusiness account. Syrita Steib, founder, president and CEO of Operation Restoration, has pointed to the stakes behind the diplomas. Women have a recidivism rate within five years of release of 30 percent, Steib said, while formerly incarcerated women who complete a higher-education degree remain out of prison 95 percent of the time, according to her figures cited in the report.
The momentum isn't stopping at the ceremony. Three students who were released after enrolling in the program are continuing their coursework and expect to graduate in December, while another former student is scheduled to finish in May. Tulane's School of Professional Advancement otherwise provides undergraduate, graduate and certificate programs primarily aimed at working adults, making this prison-based track an unusual extension of its mission.
Why Women's Prison Programs Lag Behind
The St. Gabriel graduates are entering a national landscape where women remain underrepresented in prison education. Women made up about 15 percent of incarcerated students enrolled in Second Chance Pell programs during the 2020-21 academic year, yet only 7 percent of students who earned credentials that year were women, according to Inside Higher Ed. Smaller populations at women's facilities make it harder to offer a full range of courses every semester, the outlet reported, and shorter sentences can leave women without enough time to finish a degree before release, according to NPR.
Other states have built their own versions of this model. Eastern Michigan University recently awarded Bachelor of General Studies degrees to 12 women incarcerated at the Women's Huron Valley Correctional Facility, each graduating with a 3.93 GPA, per Eastern Michigan University. That program launched in 2023 and now serves 75 incarcerated students with the same in-person instruction offered on the university's main campus. Maryland requires its corrections department to help incarcerated people access federal Pell Grants, NPR reported, and eight California prisons now offer bachelor's degree programs, two of them at women's facilities.
Nationally, the gap in access remains wide. Operation Restoration has reported that only about 600 of the nation's roughly 5,000 state and federal prisons and local jails have higher-education programs at all, according to The Advocate. Against that backdrop, the 16 women who crossed the stage at St. Gabriel this week represent one of the few places in the country where a secular, in-person bachelor's degree is within reach for women behind bars.
