Cornell University Library and the Cornell Prison Education Program (CPEP) have a long history of collaboration. Now, they’re strengthening their partnership through the continuation of a pilot program started in 2022: appointing a librarian with the formal responsibility of supporting incarcerated students in their research and helping instructors prepare them for productive lives after prison.
“I am not aware of other research libraries that have had a dedicated librarian to work directly with the faculty as well as incarcerated students—this demonstrates how rare this commitment is,” said Elaine L. Westbrooks, the Carl A. Kroch University Librarian at Cornell.
Serving CPEP is part of the library’s mission to support Cornell instruction, according to Westbrooks.
“Students who are part of CPEP are Cornell students,” she said. “Our longstanding goal is to ensure that we facilitate student learning by helping students find the information that they need and to turn that information into knowledge. Our goal is to help create confident researchers, writers, and to help them follow their intellectual curiosities, so that they can go out and change the world—as Cornell students do.”
“As a society, we want library access in prison because the pursuit of justice requires access to information,” said CPEP director Rob Scott.
“In today’s internet age, navigating digital search tools is part of daily life,” Scott added. “When incarcerated students learn to search for library resources, they are developing real-life skills that will help them solve their own problems and find their own answers. In this way it is an important component of the rehabilitative mission that our correctional system aspires to.”
CPEP alumni: Making an impact, giving back
CPEP is the largest program of its kind within the Ivy League. Since the program was formalized in 2010, more than 850 incarcerated students have completed its courses, and more than 175 have earned associate degrees while in prison. With their CPEP credits, these students are able to further pursue undergraduate and advanced degrees at Cornell and other institutions and contribute to their workplaces and communities.
A close-knit group, formerly incarcerated CPEP alumni also stay connected to the program and find ways to give back, like Jodi Anderson Jr. and Darnell Epps ’21, who both participated in CPEP Reunion events at Cornell in June.
“The CPEP experience, quite literally changed my life,” Anderson said. With a bachelor’s degree in political science and government and a master’s in education from Stanford University, he founded an online platform to help formerly incarcerated individuals find jobs. Anderson is also the director of Technological Innovation at the Cornell University School of Industrial Labor Relations’ Criminal Justice and Employment Initiative (CJEI).
“We help people who were in CPEP represent themselves in the most holistic and favorable light, and we share job opportunities and other educational opportunities,” he said.
Epps has a degree in government from Cornell and recently completed a J.D. at Yale University Law School. Like Anderson, Epps is an entrepreneur, the founder and CEO of a software-driven recruitment company in skilled trades and advanced industry.
Epps was excited to hear about the CPEP librarian position that’s dedicated to expanding information access in prisons.
“As someone who was a student on the inside, I’ve seen the limitations of what you can access through independent research. And then, when I was a student at Cornell going to the Mann Library or Olin and Uris, I saw there’s a wealth of knowledge here that most students on the inside don’t have access to,” Epps said. “And if we could bridge that gap through the [CPEP] librarian and library services on campus and establish some type of connection there, that would do justice for many of the students.”
Meet the CPEP librarian
Since August of 2022, Maddie Reynolds Ph.D. ’21 has been serving as the CPEP instructional and outreach librarian. In her role, she builds a library program for incarcerated students, develops workshops and courses on ways of doing research, and provides print and digital resources for CPEP courses, from the humanities to the social sciences.
“This would include print resources, various reference texts, databases and other types of resources that can help instructors with their classes,” Reynolds explained. “Anything that would help an instructor conduct a research project or add supplemental materials to their general course texts, I help them out with that,” she said.
With a recent grant from the Einhorn Center for Community Engagement and UCLA’s Radical Librarianship Institute, Reynolds has also been running creative writing workshops in Auburn, Cayuga, and Five Points Correctional Facilities.
In supporting teaching and expanding information access in prison, Reynolds’s work complements ongoing initiatives involving other librarians, such as the Prison Education Practicum taught by law librarian and Cornell University Law School adjunct professor, Julia Mizutani. Reynolds also builds on past collaborations between Cornell University Library and CPEP, including a pilot course in 2019, which partnered students in prison and undergraduates on campus and which also installed an offline version of JSTOR—a popular database of scholarly articles—in the computer lab of Cayuga Correctional Facility. JSTOR was also recently made available in the Cornell computer lab at Auburn Correctional Facility, thanks to Reynolds’s efforts.
As she takes a leading role in supporting CPEP, Reynolds leans on the expertise of her library colleagues in different areas.
“When I was collecting for our classroom reference libraries, I had consultations with about ten to fifteen librarians working in Olin, Mann, and the Math Library on which reference texts to include for each discipline we teach,” she said. “I’m also beginning a collaboration with student workers at Olin to print JSTOR articles for CPEP students.”
The future of the CPEP-library partnership
At Cornell Reunion last June, alumni got the chance to meet Reynolds as one of the panelists of a discussion titled “Cornell Prison Education Program (CPEP) and Cornell University Library: Past, Present, and Future.” Among the audience were CPEP supporters and former CPEP teaching assistants who were eager for updates on the program.
According to Rob Scott, who moderated the discussion, the CPEP librarian position is a necessary milestone for the evolution of the program, especially as it comes closer to offering a Cornell bachelor’s degree to incarcerated students.
Currently, CPEP offers incarcerated students the opportunity to earn credits from Cornell and SUNY community colleges, which the students can apply toward a SUNY associate’s degree program.
“The conversation with Cornell University Library really became more robust in the past year or so, as we were able to hire a librarian in anticipation of this bachelor’s degree, and that really goes beyond a SUNY associate’s degree,” Scott said.
“So much of an associate’s degree, a two-year degree, is learning from the books that you’re given by your teachers. Now, we really need—in spite of the deprivation of freedom in prison—the freedom to search for one’s own answers,” he said. “I feel like that’s really the paradigmatic shift that comes when you go from associate’s degree to a bachelor’s degrees, particularly one at a research university.”
Elaine Westbrooks, who was also on the panel, said she was excited about the future of the partnership with the prison education program, and she underscored the need for sustained support.
“I’m really proud of the fact that the library adds value to the program. We help the students, we help the faculty, and we help the instructors,” Westbrooks said.
“A lot of people talk about ‘any person, any study,’ but I cannot think of any better example of that than CPEP,” she added. “I think Ezra himself would have loved the CPEP program.”
