What We Do
TREC is a higher education ecosystem for justice-impacted students. Our College in Prison program offers Metro State’s innovative Bachelor of Arts in Individualized Studies degree to students incarcerated at three Minnesota state prisons. Our Academic Reentry program provides academic and non-academic support that students use to successfully transition back into their communities while fulfilling their educational and career goals. Across both programs, TREC works to intervene in cycles of harm, disentangle students from the criminal legal system, and connect students with resources and opportunities that promote agency, community building, transformative learning, and restoration.
History & Current Initiatives
2021
TREC, then called Metro’s College in Prison Program, started at Stillwater Correctional Facility in the fall of 2021. Despite launching in the wake of months-long pandemic-related closures, our grant-supported program was able to serve an inaugural cohort of 48 students, including those both with and without prior college experience. Extending Metro State’s emphasis on student agency and choice for adult and non-traditional learners, our focus was to offer justice-impacted students a path toward a Bachelors of Individualized Studies degree, the core degree of Metro State. Concurrently, Minneapolis College began a similarly grant-funded program at Lino Lakes Correctional Facility.
2022
By the fall of 2022, we were working in close collaboration with both Minneapolis College and the Minnesota Department of Corrections (MnDOC). These partnerships allowed for an expansion of offerings: We were able to extend Metro State’s bachelor’s degree program to Lino Lakes while Minneapolis College extended their associate’s degree program to Stillwater. The continuous strengthening of our partnership with Minneapolis College comes from the understanding that our students are best served when we reject competitive frameworks and hierarchies pervasive in higher education and instead embrace shared services, supports, and resources.
We began participating in the Second Chance Pell Experiment, which enabled our students both at Metro State and Minneapolis College to access federal Pell funding for the 2022-2023 academic year. This participation with Pell allowed us to enroll more students and undertake new curricular projects.
2023
In January of 2023 we launched our bachelor’s degree program in a third facility, Faribault Correctional Facility, and grew our total number of students to 120. Minneapolis College would later offer their own program at Faribault in the fall of 2023.
Our first graduation was held at Stillwater in the spring of 2023; four students graduated with bachelor’s degrees. At this point we knew we were closer to realizing our vision of offering not only prison education but also substantive reentry work, and so we crowdsourced among students for a new name that would encompass this expansive work. In this way, TREC (Transformation and Reentry through Education and Community) as it is known today was born. In the fall of 2023, we were able to hire graduate student Will Leaver as a reentry coordinator and started our nascent academic reentry program focused on supporting students transitioning out of prison.
2024
In the spring of 2024 we were awarded a Humanities as Transformative Programming Mellon Grant aimed at supporting curricular innovation, co-curricular programming, and documentation of our curricular work. Through this grant, we were able to support faculty members who, in collaboration with students, worked to reimagine the College of Individualized Studies curriculum to better meet academic goals and interests. These curricular task forces identified interdisciplinary concentrations that cohered around key thematics for which students had continually expressed interest: law and justice studies; science, technology and health studies; markets and communities; and our individualized and interdisciplinary studies core.
Through the Mellon Grant, we were also able to hire staff to fully support curricular needs, including our Grants and Curriculum Coordinator Emily Oliver and two facility coordinators to support daily operations at the facilities. As a result of this staffing, we were able to redefine and refine learning spaces in prison. We worked with MnDOC, emphasizing the necessity of study halls and co-curricular programming in creating an environment where study is a collective act that often occurs outside the classroom.
With this philosophy in mind, we developed Learning Labs—spaces that combine academic advising and tutoring and recreate the holistic support systems that students have access to outside of prison. We also developed our Research Clusters, collaborations between students and faculty that provide opportunities for sustained engagement around a research question. While not presuming honors designations, these Research Clusters provide opportunities for students who wish to pursue additional work with more rigor.
2025
We now offer a robust reentry program and have been able to use work study and student work programs to hire six student workers. We are currently operating in partnership with Seed Coalition to use the AmeriCorps Vista program to hire a justice-impacted Vista worker in a support role for reentry work. Additionally, over the course of the 2024-2025 academic year, we partnered with the Shavlik Family Foundation to offer a laptop program, equipping students transitioning out of prison with life-changing access to technology. In the summer of 2025, we graduated 20 more students, amounting to a total of 67 bachelor degree graduates in Metro State’s TREC program in the first four years of its existence.
Team
Travis Sands, PhD
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Travis Sands is the founding Executive Director of the Transformation & Reentry through Education & Community (TREC) Program at Metro State University. Under Travis’ leadership, the TREC Program has built both an Academic Reentry and College in Prison program that has expanded to 3 Minnesota prisons where it offers a Bachelor of Arts in Individualized Studies degree to over 100 students each year. In this role, Travis has also worked closely with faculty leaders at Minneapolis College to build the TREC Partnership, a 2+2 associate and bachelor’s degree program launched in 2022 that provides seamless transfer, shared in-facility student support services and co-curricular opportunities, and academic reentry services. Now entering its third year, The TREC Partnership currently serves over 300 incarcerated and formerly incarcerated students, has had awarded over 140 associate degrees and almost 70 bachelor degrees, and has a growing group of over 40 students in TRECs academic reentry program. An interdisciplinary scholar of sexuality, race, and political economy, Travis remains active in the classroom and, prior to this current role, served as Gender Studies faculty and the Associate Director of Faculty Development at Metro State.
Emily Oliver, MFA
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Emily Oliver is the Grants and Curriculum coordinator for the TREC College-in-Prison Program at Metro State University. In TREC, she teaches Creative Writing and a recurring course on Public Narrative. She received an MFA in Poetry from Cornell University and her work has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Southern Humanities Review and Prairie Schooner.
Julie Santella, MA
Julie is a Program Coordinator for Metro State University’s TREC Program. As Community Faculty, she has taught human geography, college writing, and academic reentry. She holds an MA in geography from the University of Minnesota.
Michael Lee, MFA, Ed.M.
Michael Lee is a Program Coordinator for Metro State University’s TREC program and additionally serves as Community Faculty in the program. He has taught courses at the college level on both the inside and outside in English Literature, Creative Writing and Interdisciplinary Studies with a focus on race, cultural studies, and modern war. He holds an MFA in English Literature and Creative Writing from Cornell University and an Ed.M in Arts Education from Harvard University.
Reentry Navigator
Isak Tranvik, PhD, Faculty Coordinator
Short bio: Isak Tranvik is an assistant professor of Individualized and Interdisciplinary Studies at Metro State University. He currently teaches courses at Metro State’s Saint Paul campus as well its TREC campuses at Lino Lakes and Faribault prisons. His teaching career began in an eighth-grade classroom at Gateway Middle in the St. Louis Public School District. Since then, he has taught courses on democracy and popular politics everywhere from research universities to church basements. Trained as a political theorist, his academic writing has been published in Political Theory, Constellations, Perspectives on Politics, and Comparative Political Studies, among other venues.
Macey Flood, PhD, Faculty Advisor
Short bio: Macey Flood is an assistant professor of Individualized and Interdisciplinary Studies at Metro State University. She teaches core classes as well as courses in science, technology, and health studies for TREC campuses and Metro State’s St. Paul campus. Macey is an interdisciplinary health humanist and cultural historian who works with archival, oral history, and community-embedded methodologies. Her work has been published in Medical Humanities, IJFAB: International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, History of Pharmacy and Pharmaceuticals, and in an edited volume through Virginia Tech University Press.
Gemma Punti, Faculty Advisor
Will Leaver, TREC Research Fellow
Will Leaver is a formerly incarcerated scholar and PhD Student in American Studies at the University of Minnesota whose work examines the existential harms and the afterlife of confinement. His research explores how systems of domination produce unnamed phenomena that shape the lives, identities and possibilities for justice-impacted individuals. He seeks to identify and name these phenomena, predicated on the belief that naming is a necessary step towards confronting, resisting, and transforming the terms of one’s return.
Student Workers
Brett King
Never Hall
Brooks Kurr