Delaware Settles Suit Over Depriving Young Prisoners of Special Education
by Chuck Sharman
Under a legal settlement approved on December 2, 2025, prisoners with learning disabilities held by the Delaware Department of Correction (DOC) moved several steps closer to receiving the educational instruction necessary to achieve a high school diploma or its equivalent. Though they are entitled by law to receive the accreditation until they turn 22, the state’s Department of Education (DOE) had made such poor efforts to counter the DOC’s inflated security concerns that some imprisoned special education students were literally shackled to their desks—in one case, after both the desk and the prisoner chained to it were shoved into a 3-by-3-foot plexiglass box. The restrictions forced a dedicated instructor in another case to learn to write backwards on the plexiglass screen separating him from his pupil.
Those were among the allegations in a 2024 lawsuit filed against the DOC and DOE by the state Community Legal Aid Society, Inc. (CLASI). That is Delaware’s public agency providing “protection and advocacy” (P&A) to citizens with disabilities, including mental health disabilities, as required by federal law. See:29 U.S.C. § 794e; and 42 U.S.C. §§ 15001 et seq. Education of those who are imprisoned is jointly provided by the DOC and the DOE’s Adult and Prison Education Resources Workgroup (APER), with the goal of helping them attain a diploma from the DOE’s James H. Groves Adult High School.
Like P&A boards in other states, CLASI’s is required to include “individuals with disabilities or parents, family members, guardians, advocates, or [their] authorized representatives,” the complaint recalled. It is also required to maintain an advisory council including those “who are knowledgeable about related issues” and who “provide procedures for public comment on the priorities and activities of the P&A and grievance procedures for current and prospective clients.”
What they found in DOC were a host of violations that essentially left prisoners needing special education to rely on “self-study,” with only occasional help from a teacher. Worse, there appeared to be no urgency to fix the problem—in fact, just the opposite: The DOC and AEPR were simply waiting out the clock until the students turned 22, after which the agencies washed their hands of any liability for the under-educated prisoners, leaving them to fend for themselves with their limited skills. It was incredibly harmful to the prisoners, and shortsighted, too; as CLASI’s Disability Rights Delaware Project Director Marissa Band told Delaware Public Radio, that high school diploma was the single most effective insurance of the prisoners’ successful re-entry after release.
“So this case is really important because it takes these students who have a great need for the ability to graduate, for their futures, that really wasn’t attainable without appropriate special education while they’re incarcerated,” Band explained.
The settlement, which was adopted in a consent decree by the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware, requires new policies and procedures to provide prisoners the rights they are guaranteed under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), 42 U.S.C. ch. 126 § 12101, et seq., the Rehabilitation Act (RA), 29 U.S.C. § 701, et seq., and the Individual with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), 20 U.S.C. § 1400, et seq. Defendants had 60 days to draft and submit those revisions to CLASI for comments before finalizing them. Should the parties fail to resolve any dispute on their own, the district court retained the authority to make a final determination to enforce the ADA, RA and IDEA.
In addition, the decree stated that imprisoned special education students must each have an individualized education plan (IEP), and they must receive at least four hours of daily instruction, with at least a portion of each session led by an instructor, conducted in the least restrictive environment possible. Though CLASI’s claims were specific to the unmet special education needs of prisoners at Howard R. Young Correctional Institution and James T. Vaughn Correctional Center, the consent decree’s provisions extend to eligible prisoners incarcerated in all DOC lockups statewide.
“The students will start receiving the education that they need, and this is particularly critical because people in jails and prisons have disabilities at a much greater rate than the general population,” said Todd Gluckman, one of the attorneys representing Plaintiffs from Terris, Pravlik & Millian in Washington, D.C. “And a lot of these students had not been receiving needed special education for years.” See: Comm. Legal Aid Soc., Inc. v. Adult & Prison Educ. Resources Work Grp., USDC (D. Del.), Case No. 1:24-cv-00615.
Additional source: Delaware Public Radio
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Related legal case
Comm. Legal Aid Soc., Inc. v. Adult & Prison Educ. Resources Work Grp.
| Year | 2025 |
|---|---|
| Cite | USDC (D. Del.), Case No. 1:24-cv-00615 |
| Level | District Court |