Mellon's Radical Prisoner Education

At the Stateville Correctional Center—a maximum-security prison in Illinois, which Gov. JB Pritzker ordered closed last year for unrelated reasons—a group of professors offered courses for inmates, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

- By John D. Sailer

One course, “Research, Writing, and Mass Incarceration,” began with a workshop run by Bill Ayers—a co-founder of the Weather Underground, a Marxist terror group responsible for dozens of bombings in the U.S. in the 1970s.