The Cornell Prison Education Program (CPEP) was established at Cornell University to provide college courses to incarcerated people in upstate New York, promote equitable access to higher education, and to "engage Cornell faculty and students with the vital issue of the country's burgeoning incarceration population." The program began with a few faculty members offering classes at Auburn Correctional Facility on a voluntary basis following the decline of taxpayer-funded college programs at the national and state levels in the mid-1990s. Cornell University began offering course credit for the classes in 1999, the program began to seek out additional funding in 2005, and Cornell Prison Education Program was fully formalized in 2010, offering twelve courses per semester taught by faculty and graduate students. The program partners with Cayuga Community College to offer an Associate degree program for men incarcerated at Auburn Correctional Facility and Cayuga Correctional Facility.

Writer's Bloc literary journal was founded by Rahul Desai and Julia Woodward, undergraduate Teaching Assistants for CPEP. The first volume was published in 2009. The mission of the journal is to "promote incarcerated peoples' self-expression and to educate the general public about incarceration." Bridges literary journal was founded in 2011 by students enrolled in the course AEM3380: Social Entrepreneurship taught by Anke Wessel in partnership with CPEP.

Source: “Cornell Prison Education Program.” Cornell University. Accessed April 8, 2024. https://cpep.cornell.edu/.