The Muhlenberg College Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program is a joint collaboration between Muhlenberg College and the Lehigh County Department of Corrections. The program closely aligns with the APA Guidelines for the Undergraduate Psychology Major, Version 3.0, and is driven by the idea that access to education and sustained community connection across difference creates belonging and care within communities that are otherwise separated by privilege and dispossession.


The poster will feature details of the Inside-Out Prison Exchange course, which is a unique educational experience that brings together traditionally-enrolled Muhlenberg College undergraduate students with incarcerated adults as classmates in a semester-long college-level academic course. We will highlight course content that addresses incarceration in the United States through a psychological lens and utilizes many types of knowledge - that developed through scholarly study, personal experience, and societal position. We explore basic psychological concepts that describe and explain behavior, while allowing for individual differences in evaluating plans to reduce the harms of incarceration in our community. While the work of this college-level course includes reading a variety of scholarly texts, writing papers, and engaging in independent inquiry, a hallmark of it is the meaningful small and large group class discussions. The Higher Education Research Institute assessed that sustained intensive dialogues increase civic learning and democratic engagement, and longitudinal studies also show that incarcerated individuals who participate in a college course during their incarceration are least likely to recidivate and more likely to find and sustain employment after incarceration. This poster will outline the multi-year development of our program and present several years of assessment of our relational learning goals. These goals have been central to creating a collaborative learning community that meets multiple outcomes identified in the APA Guidelines for the Undergraduate Psychology Major, Version 3.0.