About CEP

Our Mission

The Community Education Project at Stetson University offers comprehensive liberal arts education within Florida’s prison system. We work with students to facilitate personal and intellectual development and contribute to the enrichment of our communities.

Our History

The CEP operates at the Tomoka Correctional Institution located in Daytona Beach, Florida, only 15 miles from Stetson University's DeLand campus. The program was established by Stetson faculty members in January 2015. The CEP started as "Migration & Mobility," a weekly reading group with 12 incarcerated students, but it quickly blossomed into a far more ambitious program. Currently, the CEP is the only higher education project of its kind in the state that offers credit-bearing college courses and focuses on liberal arts instruction, rather than vocational training. Since 2015, more than 25 faculty members have offered semester-length courses, lecture series, workshops and guest lectures in Anthropology, Computer Sciences, Communications and Media Studies, Digital Arts, Education, English, Film Studies, History, Latin American and Latinx Studies, Mathematics, Music, Philosophy, Food Studies, Portuguese, Public Health, Religious Studies, Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, Sociology and Spanish. CEP students have presented their emerging scholarship at local, regional and national conferences. In recent years, CEP has also increased its focus on food education and assisted the Tomoka CI students with creating and maintaining a garden. In addition to classroom instruction at Tomoka CI, the CEP instructors and students are committed to raising critical awareness about the causes and consequences of incarceration through public presentations and scholarship.