News Center

Hendrix to Host Prison Education Advocate

LoriPompa_0053.JPGCONWAY, Ark. (September 13, 2019) — National Prison Reform Advocate Lori Pompa will discuss Prison Reform from the Inside-Out on Wednesday, Sept.18, at 5:30 p.m., in Mills C (Mills Social Sciences Center) at Hendrix College. 

The event is free and open to the public. It is sponsored by the Hendrix College Department of Politics and International Relations and underwritten by a Hendrix College Mellon Diversity and Inclusion grant. Pompa’s talk will also serve as a component of Hendrix’s annual Constitution Day commemoration. For more information, contact Hendrix politics professor Dr. Delphia Shanks-Booth at Shanks-booth@hendrix.edu or 501-450-3825.

Lori Pompa has been going into prisons for the past 35 years and has taken thousands of students (and others) into correctional facilities through a variety of courses and exchanges during that time. She has been on the Criminal Justice faculty at Temple University since 1992, and is Founder and Executive Director of The Inside-Out Center at Temple University, International Headquarters of The Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, which she began as a single class in 1997. As a 2003 Soros Justice Senior Fellow, Pompa collaborated with others on both sides of the prison wall to develop Inside-Out into an international model of transformative pedagogy. Over the past 17 years, more than 1,000 college and university instructors from throughout the U.S. and 12 other countries have taken part in The Inside-Out Training Institute. Hundreds of Inside-Out classes have been offered to date, involving approximately 40,000 inside (incarcerated) and outside (campus-based) students.

This fall, Hendrix politics professor Dr. Jay Barth is teaching a criminal justice course using the Inside-Out model to Hendrix students and incarcerated individuals from Arkansas’s Wrightsville Correctional Unit. The course, and Dr. Barth’s training for the program, was underwritten by a grant to Hendrix from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This summer, Hendrix politics professors Dr. Kim Maslin and Dr. Delphia Shanks-Booth were trained in the Inside-Out model. Read more about the project here.

About Hendrix College

A private liberal arts college in Conway, Arkansas, Hendrix College consistently earns recognition as one of the country’s leading liberal arts institutions, and is featured in Colleges That Change Lives: 40 Schools That Will Change the Way You Think About Colleges. Its academic quality and rigor, innovation, and value have established Hendrix as a fixture in numerous college guides, lists, and rankings. Founded in 1876, Hendrix has been affiliated with the United Methodist Church since 1884. To learn more, visit www.hendrix.edu