15 October 2026
Words: Josefina Salomón – Photos: Patricio A. Cabezas
The prison population is rising across the world. While some governments claim that incarceration is the most effective tool for tackling crime, analysts argue that on its own, it does nothing but fuel the cycle of violence, and that education is the best strategy to transform lives and communities. Here are the people behind some of the most innovative projects and the challenges they face.
Diego Cepeda, 39, never thought about going to university, let alone becoming a lawyer.
One afternoon, while finishing high school at the only federal prison in the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina, he looked through the classroom’ small window to a courtyard where a group of other inmates were playing football.
They practised for two hours every day.
“I want to be there,” Cepeda thought.
“There” was the Devoto University Centre —the CUD, as everyone calls it— the first higher education programme in an Argentine prison, and one of the first in Latin America.
While serving their sentences, inmates can study economics, psychology, philosophy and literature, sociology, and law, as well as participate in workshops, conferences, and seminars.
Professors from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina’s largest public educational institution, teach the courses, but it is the students who run the programme and the space: they recruit students, clean, prepare meals, and organise events with people from “the outside”.
Cepeda, who had already spent time in other prisons, was transferred to Devoto in 2008, when he was 23 years old.
He saw the CUD as an opportunity to develop new tools for life outside prison and began attending computing workshops, helping in the kitchen, and cleaning the rooms. Over time, he enrolled in an economy degree. The idea was to spend as much time as possible outside his wing, one of the most violent in the prison. His main goal was to survive.
“I wanted to spend as much time as I could at the CUD. There are events there, people from outside come in whom you can talk to, who bring new ideas. That’s where the logic of confinement is broken. It’s still a prison, but it becomes different. It takes you away from the day-to-day reality. For me, it was a lifeline,” says Cepeda, recalling the moment his experience of incarceration changed.
To reach the CUD, you need to cross three huge iron gates, two metal detectors, and decades of history.
Behind the final gate, made of thick black iron bars, everything changes. The guards, and the prison, are left behind.
The walls of the wide main corridor are crammed with posters announcing events, course schedules, and general advice. A handwritten letter from Pope Francis, written in 2023, hangs next to the main office.
Each of the faculties that make up the CUD has its own classrooms with tables, chairs, and whiteboards.
There are books, notebooks, and materials. There is also a large room where meetings and events are held.
At the end, a poster displays the names of the 50 people who have graduated since the university opened in 1985, when a group of students negotiated with professors who had just returned from exile at the end of Argentina’s most recent, and brutal, dictatorship, to open the first free university inside a prison in Latin America.
The inmates refurbished, with their own labour and money, what was previously an abandoned wing of the prison.
It was a collective effort, “very impressive”, as professors and former students recall now, many years later.
The place is a world apart from the rest of the penitentiary complex, where 1,506 people survive overcrowding and poor building conditions, among many other problems, according to the latest report by the National Penitentiary Ombudsman’s Office. The complex, which served as a clandestine detention and torture centre during Argentina’s last military dictatorship between 1976 and 1983, is situated in a sought-after residential area of Buenos Aires.
Education programmes in prison contexts are gaining popularity in many countries, where governments are seeking alternative ways to deliver justice as the global prison population rises.
In Argentina, for example, the number of incarcerated people quadrupled between 1996 and 2022, and continued to rise from 2023 onwards. The majority of people are held in pre-trial detention, they haven’t been convicted. A large proportion did not finish secondary school and come from marginalised backgrounds. The impact of incarceration is particularly harsh on women, who are often single heads of households, and on trans people, who face various forms of discrimination. The situation in Argentina illustrates what is happening in prisons across Latin America and the world.
Those working on prison education projects say that learning is an essential part of any strategy seeking to promote justice and reduce violence.
One of them is Baz Dreisinger, a journalist, author, and founder of Incarceration Nations Network (INN), an organisation operating in a dozen countries worldwide that researches, disseminates, and promotes innovative justice and prison reform initiatives.
Dreisinger has seen it all. From literature and theatre programmes in women’s prisons in Thailand to restorative justice projects between victims of the Rwandan genocide and their perpetrators, and education initiatives in semi-open detention centres in Australia.
“There are many programmes around the world that impress me. Those run by Justice Defenders in Kenya and Uganda, which offer law degrees, for example, are revolutionary because they empower incarcerated people and their communities, which also end up benefitting. In the United States, there are also very good examples of programmes that were redesigned around the idea of reintegration, helping prisoners complete their studies when they return to their communities and thus benefitting them as well,” Dreisinger explains.
Dyjuan Tatro, government affairs officer for the Bard Prison Initiative, a programme that provides incarcerated individuals in New York prisons with free access to university, says that education in prison helps many people overcome the racism and poverty that in many cases contributed to them ending up in prison in the first place.
“Education radically changes the trajectory of a life. People who earn a degree in prison not only have some of the lowest recidivism rates, but, more importantly, they achieve the best outcomes after regaining their freedom,” he explains.
Like Cepeda in Argentina, Tatro states that being able to study while in prison gave him a major goal to work towards.
“Prisons destroy a person’s pride. Prisons isolate and marginalise people even more than they already were. For me, walking into a Bard classroom was like stepping out of prison; it liberated my mind and my soul. Being a student, and not a prisoner, made me feel proud. Sitting in those classrooms connected me with my peers and with the world. University is the antithesis of prison.”
The most successful programmes tend to go beyond purely academic aspects.
This is what Ramiro Gual, a researcher and law professor at the University of Buenos Aires who has been teaching at Devoto since 2016, calls “building citizenship”.
“In Argentina, the management (of the education programmes) is left in the hands of the students, and that is where they generate a lot of skills and knowledge that allow them, in the future, to set up their own project, their cooperative, for example,” Gual explains.
In Argentina, the CUD and the CUSAM, a university operating in Unit 48 of San Martín in Greater Buenos Aires, have independent student unions, complete with rules and elections for representatives who liaise with authorities when students have specific requests.
The programmes create not only professionals but also citizens capable of defending their rights and those of their communities.
Regaining freedom is a complex process for most people who go through prison. States typically provide little support to those needing to reunite with their families and communities, or find work, which is particularly difficult for individuals with criminal records.
In Argentina, a government agency exists which, in theory, accompanies the process, helping those who regain their freedom to find work and rebuild their social ties. In practice, a lack of resources and, in some cases, political will against a backdrop of economic crisis do not help.
When Diego Cepeda began considering his options and what would come after incarceration in 2016, he saw that lawyers who studied at the CUD had a better chance of working because they could practice independently, despite having a criminal record. Being a law student also helped improve his day-to-day life in his wing, which he defines as particularly violent.
“I was useful to the lads in the wing because I brought information. In the CUD I could consult the Penal Code, ask questions about their cases; I served as an advisor to them,” he explains.
By studying law, he was able to better manage his own legal process and assist other inmates with individual and collective grievances. Today, his clients include people housed in Devoto. They choose him because he understands, from experience, what they need, far better than someone who has not experienced incarceration.
Cepeda graduated in 2021, when strict pandemic isolation measures were still in place in Argentine prisons. He was released a few months later. Having a degree gave him something to build upon, a sense of hope.
But not everyone shares the same experience.
Silvana Ortiz, who was released from Unit 46 of San Martín in 2023, says that for women in prison, who are mostly single heads of household, the challenges that follow release are generally even greater.
“When I came out, I looked for work everywhere, but there was nothing. At the probation office (patronato), they told me they were going to help me, but nothing came up. There are many cases of women who, because of this, say after being released that they were better off in prison than outside,” she says.
Things changed when someone recommended she approach Esquina Libertad, a printing and audiovisual production cooperative made up of incarcerated people, former inmates, and their families.
“La Coope” (The Co-op), as everyone calls it, was formed in 2010 in response to a need identified by relatives during conversations while queuing outside Devoto prison, as they waited to visit their loved ones. Today, around 500 people are part of the productive cooperative and collaborate closely with educational projects in half a dozen prisons, including Devoto and San Martín, where the San Martín University Centre (CUSAM) operates.
CUSAM is another educational project that places emphasis on what happens after incarceration.
“This is like any other university, the difference is that it is located inside a prison,” says Matías Bruno, a professor from the National University who works at CUSAM.
In its classrooms, men, women, and even guards study together and can choose between social work, sociology, or a dozen workshops. The focus is not only on academic achievements; CUSAM encourages those who study to use what they learn to develop projects that benefit their communities.
One of these is the public library of La Carcova, a neighbourhood near the prison, created by sociologist Waldemar Cubilla after leaving prison.
Cubilla, who was born in La Carcova, an informal settlement built next to the country’s largest open-air landfill, grew up during one of Argentina’s worst economic crises in the 1990s.
Over four years, the economy shrank by nearly 28% and in response to the brutal drop in consumption, many factories closed and poverty exploded. Like many residents of La Carcova, Cubilla, who was a teenager, helped his family survive by foraging for things to sell or food in the dump. Eventually, he turned to robbery, alongside other teenagers from the neighbourhood.
By the age of 23, Cubilla had already been arrested twice for armed robbery. The first time, when he was 14, cost him a month in a juvenile detention centre. The second time, he spent five years in a maximum-security prison.
Despite everything, he maintained his love for reading.
“In his backpack, he always carried a gun and a book,” says Gisela Pérez, his partner.
In prison, Cubilla finished secondary school and convinced the director to allow him access to reading materials for a law degree. When he regained his freedom in 2005, he enrolled at a private university to finish the degree, but money was tight, and he returned to what he knew: stealing cars to support his family and pay the university fees.
The third time he was arrested, Cubilla was sent to Unit 48 of San Martín, where he met other prisoners he knew and discovered that they also wanted to study.
“There were many who could not read or write,” he recalls. “They would receive documentation about their cases and couldn’t understand what was written, so it was important to do something.”
Cubilla was part of a group of inmates that contributed to the opening of CUSAM.
“It was about much more than studying,” Cubilla explains.
“I remember that when I would leave my cell, I would take the opportunity to talk to other prisoners, to see what they needed. Talking about the university was an excuse to foster better relationships among people in the prison, and it helped reduce violence.”
But even for Cubilla, life outside prison when he regained his freedom with his sociology degree in 2011 was difficult.
“Life had changed for most of us. We had new jobs that kept us busy and we were raising children,” Pérez explained.
“For Waldemar, it was hard to find a new space, a new role amidst all that.”
Until one day a friend suggested: “You like books. Why don’t you open a library here?”
“At first people thought we were crazy, but I knew the library was a good idea. It had worked in prison and it was going to work here,” he said.
Now, the community library and cultural centre is a building with three large rooms located in a part of the neighbourhood where there used to be only rubbish. It stands next to an open-air shrine dedicated to Gauchito Gil, an Argentine folk hero who used to take from the rich to give to the poor.
“We are not a conventional library, a quiet space where you can find books all neatly organised,” says Gisela. “We are a library that builds community, where you can come to learn but also find support. We are trying to offer alternatives to young people who are going through a tough time.”
Just under 1,000 incarcerated people study university degrees between the CUD and CUSAM, a tiny proportion of the total prison population.
The programmes have no cap limits; the only requirement is to have completed secondary education. Paradoxically, demand does not overwhelm the capacity of the space. The commitment and dynamic of the courses are not for everyone.
Attracting students is not the only challenge these programmes face. In Argentina, for example, the main issue is a lack of resources, as funding depends on what each faculty can allocate to them and, to a large extent, on the personal commitment of the teaching staff.
Questions about the future are a constant in conversations with professors, students, and former inmates.
Since taking office in late 2023, the far-right President Javier Milei has drastically cut public spending, including funding for public universities, which has affected programmes operating within prisons.
The attacks did not stop there. In 2025, the Ministry of Security attempted to restrict access to university education centres within detention facilities. The measure was overturned shortly afterwards following an appeal by human rights organisations.
Educational programmes are fighting to maintain their space while “tough on crime” policies gain popularity almost worldwide. People who support the programmes know that providing education in prisons is not always immediately popular, and that many view it as a waste of time and resources. But they say these views respond to the lack of an informed debate.
“People have this fantasy that when someone leaves prison after 15 years of living in terrible conditions and has a criminal record for another 10 years, after all that they will somehow be able to find a well-paid office job in a nice part of town,” says Matías Bruno, a professor at CUSAM.
“But that’s not what happens. At CUSAM, we propose a different approach. Education, ultimately, is the best security policy because it gives people the tools required to move away from crime.”
Cepeda, who graduated as a criminal defence lawyer from the CUD, is one example of what education can achieve, though the road has not been an easy one.
“The experience in prison, and in the aftermath, is worlds apart between those who have access to education and those who do not. A degree does not make you bigger or better than anyone else, but it changes your life,” he says, as he prepares to return to Devoto to visit his clients.
The original version of this article was published in In.Visibles in 2025, with the support of the Bard Prison Initiative and Incarceration Nations.
