Equipping learners with information literacy is essential to supporting their success, but with limited access to educational materials or technological experience, students in prison are often unable to build those key skills. The JSTOR Access in Prison initiative offers students on the inside free direct or offline access to JSTOR’s extensive and ever-growing library of peer-reviewed journal articles, scholarly ebooks, and open research reports, granting them research experience commensurate with that of a traditional college.
If you’re interested in bringing JSTOR access to a jail or prison you work with, we’ve outlined steps below. Contact us for a consultation to go over any questions you may have about the initiative or the implementation process.
How to get started
- Locate an IT professional from your partnering department of corrections facility. We can review security requirements and coordinate the whitelisting of jstor.org or pep.jstor.org.
- Receive permission from your higher education institution. Institutions already using JSTOR with current licensing agreements do not need to sign new agreements.
- Provide the new IP address and identify if the site will use jstor.org or the mediated version, pep.jstor.org.
- Designate up to five administrators. If your site needs more than five administrators to manage requests, or if your sites require training, schedule a call with the JSTOR Access in Prison team.
Our mission
We believe that a freely available library of high-quality educational content can provide a counterpoint to the growing impact of for-profit education and technology solutions in prison and play a positive role in helping to lower the cost and improve the outcomes and experience of education in prison.
We’re proud that the JSTOR Access in Prison collection contains the same respected corpus of secondary literature available to students on the outside without cost for DOCs or higher education in prison programs.