Professor Laura Ciolkowski, faculty in the Department of WGSS and Director of the Jail Education Initiative, has won the 2025 Distinguished Community Engaged Service Award.
Since she first joined the Department of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies in 2018, Laura Ciolkowski has been working to build a broad, university-wide community in support of higher education in jail and to create educational programming and degree pathways for people incarcerated in Western Massachusetts. “The work of justice in education cannot be done alone,” Professor Ciolkowski says, “I believe it must be done in community with others and, so, I am deeply honored to receive this award for community-engaged service.”
Drawing on her previous work at the Center for Justice at Columbia University and her teaching experience in prisons in New York State, Professor Ciolkowski focuses her efforts on creating new opportunities for incarcerated people to access higher education and on clearing pathways for formerly incarcerated people to continue their education. “Higher education in prison and jail addresses the power to be seen and heard in a public sphere in which incarcerated people are routinely silenced and erased from our civic institutions, disappeared from their communities, and isolated from their families and networks of support,” she says. As WGSS faculty and Director of the Jail Education Initiative, Professor Ciolkowski continues to broaden policy dialogues about equity and access to public higher education and to forge coalitions of community partners, nurture institutional collaborations, and build strong working relationships with educators and administrators inside jail, community organizers, university administrators, Five College faculty, students, staff and partners in reentry support in Massachusetts and beyond.
In 2021, Professor Ciolkowski was recognized with the Distinguished Community Engaged Teaching Award. In 2023, she was the recipient of the College Outstanding Teaching Award.
About the Jail Education Initiative (JEI): Founded in 2019, the JEI offers tuition-free, credit-bearing UMass courses inside local jails. The Initiative also trains students to offer academic mentorship and tutoring inside jail through the Teaching & Learning in Carceral Spaces project (apply now to join the 2025 Teaching & Learning in Carceral Spaces cohort)