When a woman leaves Philadelphia’s Riverside Correctional Facility, she typically receives just five days of medication and often lacks health insurance and identification. Kriya Patel, a May Penn grad and a 2016 President’s Engagement Prize winner, hopes to change that by working with incarcerated women on their reentry into society.

“At Riverside right now, there are 641 women, but within the past 12 months 5,200 have been released,” Patel says. “We [hope] to process 18 applications a day, which, within a year, would mean helping 4,050 women receive Medicaid.”

The idea originated after Patel took “Women and Incarceration” with Kathleen Brown, practice associate professor in Penn’s Nursing School. The students learned about the city’s prison system and visited Riverside weekly.

“I’ve been doing it for many years,” Brown says. “It’s a population I have compassion for; many of them are forgotten people. ... There are too many barriers for them to create a new crime-free life.”

The President’s Engagement Prizes, the largest of their kind in higher education, provide undergraduate winners with up to $100,000 for project implementation and $50,000 to live. With her Prize, Patel said she wants to ease the burden on these women. “There’s often this misconception that people in prison are bad people who had their chance,” she says. “In reality, it’s more often circumstances and lack of opportunity and intervention.”

Patel and Brown kicked off the project July 5. They’re in the process of hiring four part-time employees—ideally people who have clearly demonstrated they’ve rebuilt their lives post-incarceration—and the Penn team continues to work with the Pennsylvania Prison Society and the County Assistance Office.

The project thought process goes something like this: Provide solid, feasible health-care options to these prisoners, and other aspects of life will improve. “You can’t start talking about jobs and developing a new life if you’re not physically and mentally healthy,” Brown says. “You have to be those things first.”

Success in this area could trickle down to the prisoners’ offspring, too. On average, each person at Riverside has two children and, given Patel’s number goal, that equals assistance for 12,150 people: 4,050 women and their 8,100 children.

Though Patel hasn’t solidified long-term career plans, she knows she wants to work with just such a population. The Prize moves her one step closer. “I really wanted this for these women,” she says. “I want this so badly for them.”