Getty Obama poised to give financial aid to federal, state prisoners The move, which could come as soon as this week, would end a 20-year ban on offering Pell grants to state and federal prisoners. 
 
 More prisoners may soon have access to federal subsidies to pay for college under a new Obama administration initiative, ending a 20-year ban on Pell grants for state and federal prisoners. 
 
 The move could come as soon as this week. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Attorney General Loretta Lynch are scheduled to visit Goucher College’s Prison Education Partnership at the Maryland Correctional Institution in Jessup on Friday, to make “an important announcement related to federal aid.” 
 
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 On Monday, Duncan said that restoring Pell eligibility for those potential students is one way his agency hopes to increase college affordability. 
 
 “We’ll have more information soon,” Duncan said. 
 
 His agency could circumvent the federal ban, doing an end-run around Congress, through its experimental sites program, which gives some colleges limited exemptions to federal financial aid rules. 
 
 “A lot of my friends here in Washington have been talking about the need for debt-free degrees. And they’re right,” Duncan said during a higher education policy speech at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. “We want to do even more, developing experimental sites that will make Pell grants available to programs that award credentials based on demonstrated competency, to incarcerated adults seeking an independent, productive life after release, and to adult learners who enroll in short-term certificate programs that provide job-ready training.” 
 
 For the current academic year, Pell grants are worth up to $5,775. 
 
 The Obama administration has increased total federal aid available to students by more than $50 billion and increased tax benefits and credits by an additional $12 billion, part of a total of about $150 billion a year in grants and loans for higher education. More than 2 million additional students now receive Pell grants, and the maximum Pell award has increased by more than $1,000. 
 
 Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have expressed support for such a policy, and House Democrats including education committee ranking member Bobby Scott (D-Va.) introduced legislation to reinstate Pell eligibility for federal and state prisoners. (Prisoners in local, municipal or county correctional facilities haven’t been banned from access to Pell.) 
 
 Prisoners who participate in correctional education programs are 43 percent less likely to return to prison and 13 percent more likely to have a job after finishing their sentence, the bill’s co-sponsors noted. 
 
 Late last year, the Education Department clarified that students in juvenile justice facilities that aren’t federal or state institutions are eligible for Pell grants. And in recent months, President Barack Obama has called for reform of the criminal justice system. ||||| Prison inmates will soon have access to Pell grants, which assist in tuition and other education-related costs. WSJ reporter Joshua Mitchell discusses the program as well as some of the controversy around it. Photo: Reuters 
 
 The Obama administration plans to restore federal funding for prison inmates to take college courses, a potentially controversial move that comes amid a broader push to overhaul the criminal justice system. 
 
 The plan, set to be unveiled Friday by the secretary of education and the attorney general, would allow potentially thousands of inmates in the U.S. to gain access to Pell grants, the main form of federal aid for low-income...
– The Obama administration is planning to restore access to federal college subsidies for a huge number of Americans who have a lot of time on their hands. Congress banned inmates at the state and federal level from receiving Pell grants in 1994, but Education Secretary Arne Duncan says he'll have an "important announcement" to make when he visits a Maryland prison this week, reports Politico. The administration will be able to temporarily lift the ban without going through Congress by treating the restoration of grants as an experiment in reducing re-offending rates, reports the Wall Street Journal, which notes that prisoners received $34 million in Pell grants in 1993. Pell grants are worth up to $5,775 a year, which Rep. Donna Edwards, co-sponsor of a bill to permanently restore the grants to prisoners, notes is a lot less than the $40,000 or so it costs to keep an inmate behind bars for a year. "We haven't really been able to get a handle on recidivism," the Democrat tells the Journal. "We have to present some training and opportunities. These are programs that work." The prison population has doubled in the 20 years since the grants were removed, and the bill's co-sponsors say inmates who take part in education programs are 43% less likely to end up back in prison, Politico notes. (This month, President Obama became the first sitting president to visit a prison.)