College in Prison

Daniel Karpowitz

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780813584126
• eBook ISBN: 9780813584133
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Higher Education
• Index: Social Sciences

Over the years, American colleges and universities have made various efforts to provide prisoners with access to education. However, few of these outreach programs presume that incarcerated men and women can rise to the challenge of a truly rigorous college curriculum. The Bard Prison Initiative is different. College in Prison chronicles how, since 2001, Bard College has provided hundreds of incarcerated men and women across the country access to a high-quality liberal arts education. Earning degrees in subjects ranging from Mandarin to advanced mathematics, graduates have, upon release, gone on to rewarding careers and elite graduate and professional programs. Yet this is more than just a story of exceptional individuals triumphing against the odds. It is a study in how the liberal arts can alter the landscape of some of our most important public institutions giving people from all walks of life a chance to enrich their minds and expand their opportunities. Drawing on fifteen years of experience as a director of and teacher within the Bard Prison Initiative, Daniel Karpowitz tells the story of BPI’s development from a small pilot project to a nationwide network. At the same time, he recounts dramatic scenes from in and around college-in-prison classrooms pinpointing the contested meanings that emerge in moments of highly-charged reading, writing, and public speaking. Through examining the transformative encounter between two characteristically American institutions—the undergraduate college and the modern penitentiary— College in Prison makes a powerful case for why liberal arts education is still vital to the future of democracy in the United States.

Chapter 1

Getting In

Conflicting Voices and the Politics of College in Prison

College in prison is offensive. When hard-working people struggle to pay their kids’ tuition and people carry more debt for college than on their credit cards, handing the guilty a free education is an outrage. Commit a crime and get a free education? We ought to reward those who play by the rules and punish those who don’t.

The American rate of imprisonment has increased 500 percent since 1980 and the money spent on staffing prisons has increased over 400 percent. Totaling about 80 billion dollars a year, state spending on prisons now often exceeds budgets for higher education. Some unions for prison staff complain of the rising cost of college for their kids, but fall silent on the role their own sector has played in drawing money away from public investments in education.

Creating college opportunity inside is inexpensive and its fiscal benefits are large. Almost everyone who goes to college while in prison is released—and almost none of them ever go back. Populist critics rarely object to the millions spent on non-college “programs” in prison: therapies, boot camps, evangelical “character building,” and other techniques of behavioral modification. It may be the dignity or social status of higher education alone that provokes resentment, not the money it costs. We should be working to make college affordable and accessible for all Americans, rather than pretending that keeping it away from people in prison does anybody else any good.

Prison should be a place where bad people are sent to suffer for the wrongs they have done to others. Our success in lowering crime has come through increased policing, harsher sentences, and expanded prisons. This toughness works—but it’s also a sign of moral integrity. After the excesses of the 1960s and the failures of the welfare state, Americans have regained their nerve. We no longer tolerate whining about how criminals are the victims of circumstance or inequality or racism. Crime is down because punishment is up. The desire for revenge, which makes liberals cringe, is rooted in human nature and our religious traditions. Putting college in prison makes it seem that “society,” rather than individual men and women, are responsible for the crimes they have committed: it’s a sign of moral weakness and of backsliding toward the failed, liberal sentimentality of the past.

Mass incarceration is “the New Jim Crow.” A college that enters today’s prison system becomes the handmaiden of something irredeemably corrupt. Out “on the street,” liberal arts colleges are bastions of class and racial privilege. When they step inside a prison to help a fraction of those confined there, they provide a fig-leaf for a system that should instead be abolished.

One in three African American men will spend part of their lives behind bars. An African American child born today is six times more likely to go to prison than the white child born nearby, and blacks are disproportionately stopped, arrested, and incarcerated in every state in the U.S. Notoriously, California has at times gone so far as to plan future prison-building by counting the number of poor children of color in their elementary schools.

The leaders of America’s systems of higher education are often passive bystanders to the broader structural inequality of which mass incarceration is only a part. Colleges and universities that have failed to make American higher education adequately equal and accessible cannot absolve themselves by making gestures on behalf of a handful of incarcerated blacks. On entering the country’s carceral factories, the country’s privileged and largely white academic institutions can only serve to make the madness seem acceptable, reformable, reformed.

To make matters worse, the implicit message of college in prison—that hard work and individual discipline can make bad people better—strengthens the logic of punishment and the illusion that American laws are color-blind and fair. Under such conditions, the “liberal arts” become a caricature, offering “transformation” to the wayward convict. Prisons—along with the self-satisfied educational reformers within them—should be swept away.

Saul Bellow was right when he mockingly declared that “education has become the great and universal American recompense. It has even replaced punishment in the federal penitentiaries. . . . The tigers of wrath are crossed with the horses of instruction, making a hybrid undreamed of in the Apocalypse.”

College and prison cannot—and must not—be reconciled.

Each of the above statements represents a real-world view of education inside our prisons that I have encountered in the past fifteen years. These views contradict each other, but none is entirely wrong.

College in prison awakens lurking doubts about whether anybody ever truly changes—a question that lies at the heart of nearly all thinking not only about education, but also about democracy itself. My aim is neither to please my natural supporters nor to persuade the skeptics. In writing this book I have tried to avoid becoming an advocate, despite the fact that I think we should clearly be doing more to provide liberal arts college in prison. As often as possible I’ve tried to draw out the complexities inherent in the work. Nearly all of the students the college has engaged in prison are guilty of serious crimes, most of them violent crimes. (Otherwise fully justified critics of mass incarceration have an unfortunate tendency to ignore or minimize the ethical and political complexity that arises from violent crime.) On the other hand, I see most forms of punishment as unfortunate mirror-images of the violence to which they respond. All of the prisons I have entered strike me as places of waste that perpetuate and intensify both racial and class inequality. As a result, prisons, among the most important and pervasive public institutions of our age, undermine our democracy and do a disservice to the republic they are meant to serve.

When students first enroll with the college inside prison, they are often well aware that what we are doing together is controversial. They may not yet appreciate, however, just how many avid supporters of college and post-secondary education there are among people who work within corrections, among public officials and career civil servants, and persistently among the broader public as well. Yet they are by and large acutely aware that many people do resent or oppose such opportunities for people in prison. Strikingly, in my experience, students in prison are often remarkably perceptive about such critiques. They understand and partially share some of the reasoning behind them, and are often sympathetic to them—despite their own personal pursuit of the opportunity and their advocacy on behalf of it as a matter of principle and policy.

Such students undertake a personal struggle to rekindle or realize their own long-deferred or thwarted ambitions, and they commit to caring for and building something precious, despite being surrounded by an institution that mostly evokes resistance, cynicism, and alienation. They explore new forms of empowerment inside a system they may reject, in its practice if not its premise. These are burdens that almost no conventional student ever faces. Indeed, the very circumstances that confront the student in prison often lead to a greater awareness of the stakes involved in pursuing education, and a more profound fulfillment of liberal learning’s promise by a wider range of students. Remaining sensitive to these burdens, while encouraging students to nevertheless challenge themselves and live up to their full potential, to take possession of their own talents and responsibility for their own cultivation, is one of the great challenges facing all who work or teach in this field. It is a challenge that many students deeply perceive and appreciate even before they have begun their formal studies. These conditions make the academic and personal achievements of students in prison all the more remarkable; they also deepen, rather than compromise, the importance of the liberal arts as a mode of education acutely relevant to the prison and students within it.

Americans have vastly diverse opinions about college in prison, as they have about crime and punishment broadly. Some believe that educating inmates is a powerful rehabilitative tool; others feel that jail must be a place of pain and deprivation. To exacerbate the issue, mass incarceration is a deeply racialized phenomenon, while college has become increasingly unaffordable for all working- and middle-class Americans regardless of where they live or the subject positions into which they have been formed.

Moral sentiments often trace divisions of race and class. They reveal divergent attitudes not only toward crime and punishment, but also toward the arts, humanities, history, literature, and science—in short, to the entire project of liberal education. At times, many simply hold such things in contempt, considering them suspiciously effete or elitist, or worse.

The views expressed about people in prison and the idea of college inside amount to arguments for and against what has been my career for a decade and a half: building networks of liberal arts colleges running inside prison. The Bard Prison Initiative, based at Bard College in New York, operates satellite campuses inside state prisons across the state. Three hundred incarcerated men and women go to Bard College full-time inside prison. They earn Bard credits and both AA and BA degrees. For the past several years we have also worked with other colleges and universities to forge similar programs of their own, in partnerships with allies in state government.

BPI’s students are demographically identical to the general population of the prisons within which we work. Yet the education they seek through BPI, and at which they flourish at such high levels, is usually the privilege of elites only. Such educational forms are defined by training in rigorous methods across many disciplines (humanistic, scientific, sociological), a principled commitment to the questioning of convention and received wisdom, and a devotion to the empowerment and transformation of the self through critical inquiry.

In the fall of 2001 Max Kenner invited me to join the faculty in the first semester of Bard’s offering college courses in prison. Max had led a group of Bard college students who had founded BPI two years earlier. Students organized whatever resources they could inside the prison—lectures, writing workshops, participation in theology seminars—but their aim was always to draw the college into offering its degree to people in prison. These undergrads, some privileged and some not, shared a sense that they could take some responsibility for how the college engaged with the world. In their eyes, the college could do its part to fill the great void left after Bill Clinton signed the Crime Control Act of 1994, a law that directed billions of federal dollars toward building more prisons, while making people inside them immediately ineligible for Pell grants.

Pell grants had made a huge impact inside American prisons. Higher education quickly became the most efficient, affordable, and effective “program” in American corrections, consistently associated with the lowest rates of recidivism—meaning people who went to college while incarcerated almost never came back to prison again. It was stunningly cheap: at their peak, in 1994, such programs nationally cost a total of one half of one percent of all Pell spending. Yet in 1995, Congress not only made people in prison ineligible for Pell grants, but also appropriated ten billion dollars of taxes to build more prisons.

Perhaps because of the ways privilege and inequality often mingled in New York City and at Bard in the 1990s, these students were keenly aware that young people from the city followed two divergent pathways coming and going “upstate.” Some were moving up for the privilege of attending colleges like Bard; many more were moved up to serve sentences that were being imposed more often, and lasting longer, than ever before. Though the phrase “mass incarceration” had not yet gained much currency, these students were among those who realized relatively early that criminal justice was emerging as the leading civil rights issue of their generation. Most importantly, they felt strongly that returning college to the prisons that lay a short drive from campus in nearly every direction was the kind of practical, local work that they, as students, could help make happen, and that would mobilize the best of what the college had to offer.

The students began cultivating relationships with prison officials and potential students, at the nearby maximum security facility called “Eastern.” A few years earlier, many of these partners had been a part of college programs before they were suddenly shut down. Many public officials—now operating in a hostile political climate—remained deeply committed to helping such opportunities return.

When I first stepped foot inside Eastern Correctional Facility to teach, I was overwhelmed by the century-old, gothic-style, maximum-security prison. I was silenced by its massive physical and spiritual presence. I felt a sense of tragedy, knowing that prisons (which in New York had grown from twenty-five to more than seventy in just a few years) were the signature public works of our generation.

But my reaction to the students, and the classroom space inside the prison, was quite different. The students were just students, and my course was just my course, and, at that early stage of my career, I especially loved teaching, anybody and anywhere. Once I walked into the classroom and the heavy metal door closed behind me, I began my introductory lecture about constitutional history and the entwined nineteenth-century problems of slavery and territorial expansion. It was the same course in law and the humanities, focused on the antebellum period, that I had taught two years earlier at Berkeley. The students, intent and committed, threw themselves into the problems of the class and the knotty tasks of interpreting and reinterpreting the texts. For me as a teacher, nothing could have seemed more natural and familiar as our journey through the material.

To this day, the approach to a prison building and the journey through its labyrinth of hallways are oppressive experiences. I am no more immune to the depressing panorama of a large prison today than I was fifteen years ago. (Most difficult for me personally is witnessing the children of people in prison passing through the gates to visit their parents.) But the classroom spaces themselves, created wherever I have the pleasure of joining students in their college work, remain as gratifying as any good learning encounter anywhere. It can be very difficult to convince professors to come inside a prison to teach a class. But once they do, they almost inevitably want to come back and do it again, and again. For it is in such classrooms, and with such students, that they are reminded of what they once loved about teaching. No doubt the logistical challenges of getting from a campus and into the prison classroom dramatize the moral and political significance of doing the work. They also heighten professors’ sense of the value of what they do. But above all, it is the students in prison who make the experience acute. They have endured the fact and conditions of their incarceration, and they have taken myriad personal risks to apply. Confronting their own past failures and broken ambitions, they must have already resolved to find opportunity in their confinement. In the face of great symbolic and material oppressiveness, these students enter college with the keenest sense of just how precious is the opportunity that lies before them.

BPI is a part of Bard College and replicates as much as possible of the curriculum and academic culture on the main campus. All students work toward Bard AA and BA degrees in the liberal arts. Courses of study include anthropology, literature, science, politics, history, studio arts—with the full intensity of what a college like Bard demands of its students. All majors are declared through an intensive, portfolio-based process called “moderation.” All students receive grades, along with qualitative narrative reports, for each class. The curriculum includes mandatory trainings in specific preparatory units like “Language and Thinking,” “Citizen Science,” and a sequence of First Year Seminars. Nearly all remediation is woven into the heart of the main, academic curriculum. Mathematics runs from precollege algebra through the full calculus sequence, although dozens of students in prison now major in mathematics, in a sequence that begins after Calculus III. Our first foreign languages, in which dozens of students have achieved proficiency or beyond, were Spanish, German, and Mandarin. Every BA degree must culminate in a yearlong intensive senior thesis. Extracurricular activities include visiting lectures by leading faculty from around the country and, most famously, the debate union, which competes with peer institutions such as West Point, the University of Vermont, and Harvard.

I have sought to draw an analogy between how Bard has approached college in prison, how I have tried to write this book, and how the most successful of our students have sought to refashion their lives. BPI has refused to make incarceration, or resistance to it, a guide to curriculum or pedagogy. Similarly, it has rejected the prison, and the correctional enterprise, as the measures of its success or failure. I see a strong parallel between this approach, the achievement of so many of our students, and my own aspiration in writing about them both. I have attempted to do what many of the students have done in the course of their lives—to resist cliché, the imagery that constitutes us, and yet which we, in turn, refashion. This is exactly what I think Mr Bay was doing in his interview: rejecting the clichés inherent in the system that confined him while avoiding other clichés to describe his own insistent search for an alternative way forward.

Every “student” depicted in the pages that follow is also an “inmate,” “offender,” or “prisoner,” in their own eyes or in the eyes of those surrounding them. In no small part, the struggles around these contested and competing identities define the milieu of the college in prison. The college’s role, I believe, is extraordinarily complex in this encounter, since the academic challenge is paradoxical: to open a space where these contested identities can be recognized as well as transcended, critiqued, and escaped and transformed—but without becoming terms that define and limit the educational project. Above all, they must not be the terms on which the encounter between the college and its students first unfolds, and they must not be the wellspring of imagery or ambition that the college and its faculty brings to their students in prison.

At BPI, we seek to address the student in prison as we would any other student at a liberal arts college. The academic encounter is thus constructed as one that unfolds not because of the prison, but despite it. Each student enters the college about as “marked” or labeled as any student could possibly be; yet part of our job is to address them as we do others who are among the 1 percent of students who study at a private, liberal arts college. The college has tried to meet each student on terms so t...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• A Note on the Text
• Chapter 1. Getting In: Conflicting Voices and the Politics of College in Prison
• Chapter 2. Landscapes: BPI and Mass Incarceration
• Chapter 3. Going to Class: Reading Crime and Punishment
• Chapter 4. The First Graduation: Figures of Speech
• Chapter 5. Replication and Conclusions: College, Prison, and Inequality in America
• Acknowledgments
• Selected Readings
• Index
• About the Author