Internationalization in Isolation: The Place and Impact of Internationalization in Higher Education Prison Initiatives

This article scrutinizes the place and impact of internationalization in higher education prison initiatives. To support this scrutiny, the article first sketches a global panorama of such initiatives and then zooms in on two representative case studies. The analysis in this article shows that introducing internationalization elements in third mission activities in general, and in prison initiatives in particular, is both possible and beneficial – in this case not only for the inmates enrolled in such programs, but also for the university students, faculty and staff participating as instructors or program organizers, and more broadly for the higher education institutions involved as well as for non-prison local communities and other higher education stakeholders.