Each week when I walk into Warren Correctional Institution, I feel a sense of purpose. I am reminded of what education can do and how closely higher education aligns with the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction’s mission to prepare individuals for successful reentry. In my classroom, that mission comes alive. Students lean into discussion, challenge ideas, support each other’s growth, and reflect in ways that reveal just how powerful education can be. I see camaraderie, mutual respect, dignity, and a safe space where people lift one another up. It has been the most rewarding experience of my teaching career.
That is why a specific provision in House Bill 338, known as Andy’s Law, concerns me. The bill aims to enhance safety for correctional staff and volunteers and provide greater transparency in sentencing after the tragic killing of Officer Andrew Lansing. Those goals are real, valid, and deeply understandable. But HB 338 goes far beyond those aims. It contains a provision removing higher education programming from close-security prisons, eliminating one of the few tools proven to reduce violence, increase stability, and support safer operations. In doing so, the bill threatens to dismantle the very programs that make facilities safer, more humane, and more manageable.
And that is where the bill contradicts itself.
Prison education is not a luxury or a reward. It is one of the most reliable safety tools we have.
Decades of research confirm what we see inside prisons every day: education lowers violence, reduces misconduct, cuts contraband activity, and helps people regulate emotions and build purpose. The evidence is overwhelming across states and decades: prisons are safer when people have access to education.
So, what does education have to do with safety? Everything. It reduces violence, creates stability, and restores humanity, one of the few proven antidotes to the hopelessness that fuels aggression.
This is why it is so troubling that HB 338 treats education as irrelevant to safety — or worse, as a privilege that can be taken away without consequence. Removing higher education from close-security prisons does more than harm incarcerated people; it destabilizes entire facilities.
Idle prisons become volatile prisons.
Hopelessness becomes anger.
And anger becomes danger.
Correctional staff know this. Educators know this. Administrators know this. The public deserves to know it, too.
Eliminating education will not make anyone safer. It removes one of the few stabilizing forces officers rely on every day, and at a time when stability is already fragile.
As an educator in Ohio, I have watched higher education face extraordinary pressure this year. From SB 1’s restructuring of our education system to the restrictions proposed in HB 338, we are watching doors close that desperately need to remain open. We cannot keep cutting off avenues for learning and then pretend we are surprised when hopelessness grows, both inside prisons and outside them.
Education reliably reduces violence, stabilizes facilities, and prepares people for safer reentry into our communities. Removing it isn’t just shortsighted. It is dangerous. And it puts correctional staff, incarcerated individuals, and the public at risk.
If Ohio is serious about safety in our schools, on our campuses, and inside our correctional institutions, then we must stop dismantling the systems that create opportunity, stability, and hope.
We cannot keep closing the doors that fulfill the very mission of rehabilitation. I witness hope take root inside prison classrooms every week. HB 338 must not shut down what works.
Laura Mishne Heller is an Assistant Professor of Social Work and Faculty in the Prison Education Program at Wilmington College.