Irvin Moore could have picked any one of Penn State’s 275-plus undergraduate programs when he started his studies at University Park last fall, but he chose to major in Rehabilitation and Human Services, the first accredited undergraduate degree that the university is offering incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals who meet the requirements in a new prison education program that launched in January.

Housed in the College of Education’s Restorative Justice Initiative, the program builds on the RJI’s existing initiative of increasing access to education for individuals in Centre County correctional facilities. It brings to fruition a longstanding wish of Efrain Marimón, the RJI’s director, who established the unit in 2015 and has steadily garnered support for its mission, not least via a cohort of professors from different disciplines who, for close to a decade, have been teaching pro bono in area prisons. Marimón, an associate teaching professor in the College of Education, formalized his efforts by pursuing accreditation for a Penn State degree program, an effort made possible by the reinstatement of federal Pell grants for incarcerated students launched in 2023 that allows all qualified incarcerated individuals in state and federal penitentiaries to pursue post-secondary education. He and his team reviewed a lengthy list of applicants who already had associate degrees—the main requirement for the program. Those who were accepted into the program transferred to SCI Benner in Centre County, where the classes are taught.

“Education is transformative, and we believe it’s a human right,” Marimón says. “Now that we’re going to have a degree program here, with its own admission processes and criteria, we believe that restorative justice will have an even greater impact for individuals on the inside and for their own communities when they return home.”

That Moore, who was incarcerated in 1969 at the age of 22 and served 52 years of a life sentence, chose the RHS degree is particularly meaningful to Marimón.

“Irvin’s story is rich and layered,” says Marimon. “In all the decades he was incarcerated, Irvin was an incredible advocate for higher education, and he has helped, along with many others, to lay the foundations for the type of work that we’re doing.”

Moore moved to State College in April 2022 after then-Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf commuted his life sentence. He was incarcerated in 1969, right on the verge of what he believes would have been a period of immense intellectual growth even though he had dropped out of high school some years prior. “I was an angry young man,” Moore says—angry mostly at being relentlessly mocked for the stutter he’d developed at the age of 8. The anger made him lash out—he joined a gym and learned to box—and the many fights he got into quickly earned him a reputation as a tough kid, which saddened and puzzled his parents and older siblings. But Moore had always been a voracious reader with a wide-ranging and eclectic taste in books—and he never stopped reading during that period of adolescent angst. Reading aloud also helped him overcome his stutter: “I’d read to my younger siblings, my nieces and nephews,” he says. “I would read from the back of a ketchup bottle, or the cereal box. I’d read them stories until late in the night.”

At the time, he was also heavily influenced by the “the first generation of Black students from my part of the world” to go to college. These young men and women from inner city Philadelphia returned home from HBCUs and other colleges to “talk to us about our history,” Moore says. “They told us about our people. They were giving us knowledge we’d never had before. They were empowering us, teaching us to have pride in ourselves that we’d never had before.”

That momentum was difficult to sustain in the face of the harsh realities of inner-city life: Poverty. Homelessness. Lack of access to health care, quality education, and other resources. And drugs—which, Moore says, were flooding the streets of North Philly. “Soon enough,” he says, “everyone I knew was either using or selling, or both.”  And he was no exception. It was a risky business to be in, he knew, a business where things could go horribly wrong in a matter of minutes—as they did for Moore that day in 1969 when he went to collect a past due payment from a customer who owed him, fired a gun he says he did not know was loaded, and killed the man whose name is forever seared in his mind.

“I begged for forgiveness for decades,” Moore says. “I still pray for Granville Sawyer, for his soul. I believe I have been forgiven but forgiving myself has been the hardest thing.”

SCI Graterford in Montgomery County, Pa., where Moore began serving his life sentence, could not have been darker, more frightening, for the young man. There were many setbacks in those initial years, many periods of solitary confinement as Moore fought against the reality of his life behind bars. But things changed when he found the “old heads,” as he calls them, a group of older inmates who seemed able to tune out their surroundings with books. “They would sit quietly and discuss what they’d read,” says Moore, who worked up the courage to approach the old heads and ask to join their group. They told him to read Man’s Search for Meaning, a memoir by Austrian philosopher and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl chronicling his time in Nazi concentration camps. The book was a tough read for Moore—but it changed the course of his life in prison. From then on, Moore read any book he could get his hands on. He began collecting books—at one point, he says, he had accumulated over 500 in his cell. He went back to his studies, he got his GED, he encouraged fellow inmates to get theirs.

Moore also played a role in bringing college-level courses to SCI Graterford. In the progressive climate of the late 1960s and early ’70s, he says, public opinion seemed to favor providing post-secondary education in prisons, and there were federal funds available for universities to start prison education programs. (Penn State ran a small such program in the ’80s.) “A group of us inmates got together and formed what we called the Coordinated Education Extension Program,” Moore says. “We talked to the warden, who was very progressive and supportive. We wrote a ton of letters to colleges and universities—LaSalle, Villanova, Lincoln University, many community colleges. Five of them responded positively.”

The winds began changing in the late ’80s and into the early ’90s. In 1994, the passage of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act prohibited incarcerated individuals from obtaining Pell grants for college education. Nationwide, universities did away with their prison programs; in Pennsylvania, Villanova was the only university that continued operating using its own funds. Moore was able to earn two associate’s degrees through that university. Those 57 credits were accepted by Penn State, and he meets the requisite criteria to pursue his undergraduate degree at Penn State and complete his studies in two academic years.

The RHS degree is centered around the idea of advocacy and support. Graduates work in various settings, including community mental health programs, drug and alcohol programs, hospitals, corrections facilities, and rehabilitation centers. To that end, “it naturally draws in a lot of individuals who are justice- or system-impacted,” says Marimón. “It gives individuals an opportunity to lead the change in helping others—peers, families, youth. As they become leaders, we can lean into them to continue to think about how to broaden the scope of rehabilitation and human services.”

Marimón is hoping that as Penn State’s prison education program—and the support for justice-impacted students both at Penn State and across the state—expands, the university will be able to offer more degrees to incarcerated individuals. “The higher you go in education, the greater the benefits to an individual, their family, and to society,” he says. He’s working closely with other Pennsylvania universities, most notably Villanova, to design a broader framework for prison education and education-based reentry that he hopes will address every aspect of incarceration and its impact both on justice-impacted individuals and society as a whole.