Dr. Romaine Campbell, an SSRC Criminal Justice Innovation and Provost Faculty Fellow at Cornell University, will speak about the unintended consequences of prison education.

Despite the rapid expansion of prison education programs in the United States, there is little causal evidence on their effectiveness. We estimate the impact of prison education on reincarceration, future employment and education using novel administrative data from Iowa. To address selection bias, we instrument for courses taken with an opportunity metric based on course availability. We find that participating in education has no detectable effect on incarceration for new crimes, but significantly increases revocations. The effects are more pronounced for post-secondary education and among white prisoners. Exploring mechanisms, we find that participating in education increases the likelihood that prisoners are released with more intensive supervision requirements, likely contributing to increased revocations.

In July 2026, Campbell will be an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics and the Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy at Cornell University. His research focuses on understanding and exploring strategies to address racial inequality in criminal justice, education, health, and labor market systems. Campbell received a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University and a B.A. in Mathematical-Economics from Wesleyan University.