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When Curiosity Builds Competence: Why Self-Directed Use of JSTOR and EBSCO Is Essential to Digital Equity for Incarcerated Students

California accepted federal digital-equity grants from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) with a promise: close skill gaps and expand meaningful access to the tools people need to thrive online. That promise explicitly extends to “covered populations,” including people who are incarcerated, and it requires measurable progress on digital literacy and digital skills—core objectives that every State Digital Equity Plan (SDEP) must address. California’s SDEP goes further, setting long-horizon targets to reduce the share of residents lacking basic digital literacy by half by 2030. Restricting incarcerated college students to use JSTOR or EBSCO only for assigned coursework runs directly against that mission. If the state intends to meet its own benchmarks, self-directed research cannot be an afterthought—it is the engine of informal digital mastery.

Digital literacy grows in the open spaces between assignments

A widely adopted definition of digital literacy centers on the ability to find, access, evaluate, organize, create, and communicate digital information. Those are not single, testable facts; they are habits of inquiry that develop through iterative exploration, trial-and-error, and reflection. In higher education, this is captured by the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy, which emphasizes inquiry, authority evaluation, strategic searching, and knowledge creation as disciplinary practices. Confining research databases to narrow, assignment-only tasks cuts students off from the messy, self-propelled practice that turns static know-how into adaptive skill.

Why JSTOR and EBSCO are ideal “gyms” for informal skill-building

JSTOR and EBSCO are not just content repositories; they are structured, feature-rich learning environments. Students refine advanced search logic, toggle subject headings and thesauri, read abstracts critically, track citations forward and backward, manage exports, and compare versions and formats. Each of these micro-moves maps directly onto digital-skills competencies that NTIA expects states to cultivate, measure, and improve over time. Teaching guides from both platforms explicitly position their tools as scaffolds for information-literacy growth, precisely the kind of non-formal and informal learning the digital-equity ecosystem seeks to recognize and amplify.

Incarcerated learners need self-directed practice even more

Correctional education research is unequivocal: when people in prison have meaningful access to education, outcomes improve. Meta-analyses from RAND link correctional education to lower recidivism and better post-release employment—a reminder that learning opportunities behind the walls yield public benefits outside them. Within California specifically, CDCR’s recent expansion of secure laptops and controlled access to scholarly databases like EBSCO—and JSTOR’s ongoing initiatives to extend access in carceral settings—acknowledge that digital research practice is both feasible and valuable under appropriate safeguards. Turning those tools into “assignment-only” portals removes the very conditions under which authentic, transferable skills take root.

Non-formal and informal learning are part of the policy architecture—not a loophole

International education bodies distinguish formal coursework from non-formal and informal learning. Non-formal learning is organized and intentional but sits outside credit-bearing syllabi; informal learning is embedded in everyday activity and self-direction. Both are indispensable to adult skill development, especially for learners who must catch up on fast-evolving digital norms. NTIA’s guidance mirrors this reality by requiring that state plans include measurable objectives for digital literacy and strategies that address barriers to participation—goals that cannot be met if practice time is limited to the four corners of a professor’s prompt.

California’s SDEP obligations make space for exploration—and measure it

Under the Digital Equity Act, California’s plan must set and track measurable objectives for digital literacy among covered populations, and it must implement strategies that sustain progress. California’s SDEP explicitly ties its vision to those NTIA objectives and commits to long-term targets, including reducing the percentage of residents without basic digital literacy by 50% by 2030. Because incarcerated Californians are a covered population in statute and in NTIA’s planning framework, restrictions that curtail their informal digital-skills practice undermine both the measurement and the achievement of those objectives. In practice, an assignment-only rule narrows the observable behaviors (searching, filtering, evaluating, citing, organizing, and synthesizing) that would otherwise demonstrate growth and feed the plan’s key performance indicators.

Security and pedagogy are not opposites

Nothing in this argument requires loosening CDCR’s security posture. The same device controls, whitelists, logging, and content approvals that govern course-related database use can also govern self-directed use. The pedagogical question is not whether to permit unfettered browsing—it is whether to allow purposeful, supervised exploration within the exact same walled garden. If California can meter and audit database sessions for assignments, it can do so for self-directed study. Denying that practice time simply reduces skill-acquisition opportunities without adding a new security benefit.

Conclusion: The assignment-only rule conflicts with the Act, the SDEP, and California’s grant obligations

California accepted federal support to document and promote digital literacy for covered populations and to implement a plan that measurably advances those skills over time. Incarcerated learners are explicitly within scope. A CDCR policy that threatens disciplinary action for using JSTOR or EBSCO outside the narrow bounds of assigned research artificially limits access to informal digital-skills training, the very ingredient that transforms episodic task completion into durable competence. By foreclosing non-formal and informal learning on approved platforms, the policy conflicts with NTIA’s measurable-objective requirements, frustrates California’s SDEP targets—including the 2030 digital-literacy reductions—and is inconsistent with the conditions under which the state sought and received grant funding. California can and should restore self-directed access within existing security controls so that incarcerated students can do what digital-equity policy expects of them: practice, iterate, and grow.