The Obama administration plans to restore federal funding to give incarcerated people access to higher education while they are serving time in federal and state institutions.

Prior to 1992, the Federal Pell Grant Program allowed prisoners to apply for up to $5,775 in education funding for each school year. However, the Higher Education Reauthorization Act of 1992 eliminated funding for Pell grants for inmates who received a life sentence without parole or the death penalty. Congress then banned inmates in federal or state institutions from receiving Pell eligibility in 1994 through a provision to the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act.

Since the end of Pell grant funding in prisons, the prison population has doubled in the last two decades.

Now, 20 years later, President Barack Obama is looking to circumvent Congress and restore access to federal college subsidies for a large number of Americans behind bars, reports The Wall Street Journal.

The administration will be able to temporarily lift the ban without getting approval from Congress by treating the restoration of grants as an experiment in reducing recidivism. This would give some colleges limited exemptions to federal financial aid rules.

The move could come as early as this week since Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Attorney General Loretta Lynch are scheduled to visit Goucher College's Prison Education Partnership at the Maryland Correctional Institution on Friday to make "an important announcement related to federal aid," reports Politico.

"We want to do even more, developing experimental sites that will make Pell grants available to programs that award credentials based on demonstrated competency, to incarcerated adults seeking an independent, productive life after release, and to adult learners who enroll in short-term certificate programs that provide job-ready training," Duncan said during speech at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

According to U.S. Rep. Donna Edwards, D-Md., a co-sponsor of a bill to permanently restore the grants to prisoners, giving inmates access to $5,775 a year is a lot less expensive than the $40,000 it costs to keep an inmate behind bars for a year.

The bill also noted that prisoners who participate in correctional education programs are 43 percent less likely to return to prison, and 13 percent more likely to get a job upon their release.

"We haven't really been able to get a handle on recidivism," said Edwards. "We have to present some training and opportunities. These are programs that work."