Manhattan district attorney’s office, in agreement with state, allocates $7.5 million in bank forfeiture funds for college programs in prison.

The Wall Street Journal reports.

College Classes Get a Boost at New York State Prisons

During an environmental-geology class about 100 miles north of New York City, college students in forest-green uniforms pored over photocopied maps of Waco, Texas.

Eager hands shot up when the professor asked what factors the students might consider in developing the land. She scribbled their answers on a blackboard: location, population, land use, crime.

The students, most of them the first in their family to attend college, are inmates at Sullivan Correctional Facility, a maximum-security men’s prison.