He said 21 students earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees this past May. The program started at Fresno State with only six students, and this fall will have up to 60, according to Trevino. Inside a small hallway at Fresno State, Trevino looks on to a wall that is plastered with photos of him and other students once in prison – but now earning university degrees. In California, the formerly incarcerated are a growing population on college campuses, and university support programs are crucial to guiding those who are released from facilities like state prisons and would like to enter university. Trevino today is an outreach coordinator at California State University at Fresno for the Project Rebound, which supports formerly incarcerated individuals at 15 campuses in the CSU, the nation’s largest four-year public university system. “After I became educated, I know I never spent another day in prison.” “I got out of prison before I got out of prison,” Trevino told the NewsHour. But he had a chance to taste the feeling of being college educated - and he enjoyed it. Some of Trevino’s friends, he says, never completed their college work as a result. The college program that allowed him to earn the associate’s degree was cut a year after his graduation, as part of reforms pushed through the federal crime bill of 1994 signed by then-President Bill Clinton, which among other things took away Pell Grants for incarcerated people to pay for college programs. It was an achievement he narrowly completed. When Arnold Trevino was released from Solano State Prison – one of several California prisons in which he was incarcerated over a 25-year period for second-degree murder – he returned home with an associate’s degree in liberal arts.

California work release program inmates