Logo for the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program

What is it REALLY LIKE inside a Correctional Facility?

The Lake Superior College Department of Sociology offers you the chance to spend time inside a correctional facility, and earn college credit while you do it. The Inside-Out Prison Exchange program is unlike any class you have ever had.  

The semester-long course meets inside the Northeast Regional Corrections Center (NERCC) located approximately 16 miles northwest of Lake Superior College. The class combines LSC students with an equal number of incarcerated men at the Northeast Regional Corrections Center. Both LSC and NERCC students have the same syllabus and academic requirements. The course is part of the national Inside-Out Prison Exchange program founded at Temple University in 1997. The Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program was based on the simple hypothesis that incarcerated men and women and college students might mutually benefit from studying crime, justice, and related social issues together as peers. Participants in that first course, and every subsequent course, have said that Inside-Out was not simply another learning experience—it transformed the way they viewed themselves and the world. Since then, hundreds of college students—from all over the U.S.—have participated in Inside-Out classes.

The course, Criminal Justice and Society, focuses on current social justice topics like:

  • why people commit crime
  • what prisons are for
  • punishment
  • rehabilitation
  • victims and victimization
  • restorative justice
  • myths and realities of prison life
  • analysis of the American Justice system

Learn more and apply for the Inside-Out Prison Exchange program

Duluth News Tribune: An inside education: Lake Superior College part of Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program

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