The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

Karpowitz, who is the Director of Policy and Academics for the Bard Prison Initiative, and Max Kenner, its founder, have been directing two satellite colleges inside two long-term maximum-security prisons and two transitional medium-security prisons for the past 11 years. Approximately 160 students are currently enrolled in the competitive program, which culminates in a Bard degree.

25 years ago, only 200,000 Americans were incarcerated; today, that number has risen to over 2 million. In fact, one out of every 100 Americans is now in prison. In the state of Connecticut, public investment in the prison system is greater than its investment in education.

These types of statistics have motivated students like Russell Perkins ’09, who for the past two years has been a part of the Prisoner Solidarity Project, a group of students who hope to bring a College in Prison program to Wesleyan modeled after Bard, Boston University and others.

“There is a conventional sense in which prisoners are the last people qualified to go to Wesleyan, but in that they largely represent a population that the educational system has profoundly failed, they are precisely the kind of students a place like Wesleyan should try to serve,” Perkins said. “Part of why I’m doing this is that I feel very strongly about Wesleyan as an institution. By incorporating this program, what we’re doing is actually committing to our belief that an education is a truly powerful thing.”

The Prisoner Solidarity Project is an offshoot of WesPREP, the Wesleyan Prison Research and Education Program, a prison advocacy group that leads workshops in prison and promotes activism on campus. Students and faculty involved in the project are proposing a two-year College-in-Prison pilot program at Cheshire Correctional Institution in Connecticut, located about half an hour away from campus.

Molly Birnbaum ’09 joined WesPREP her freshman year and has been deeply committed to the Prisoner Solidarity Project since then, working with faculty and staff to develop the program. She is also helping to write a grant for funding and organizing the symposium with other students.

“Coming from my neighborhood, prison and policing were all around me, but it was the type of thing that was just a given in the makeup of urban life,” Birnbaum said. “I wanted to address those issues of systemic racism and class oppression that plagued the place where I grew up.”

According to Perkins, the Wesleyan Center for Prison Education proposal pilot program would be highly competitive, with only 15 inmates being admitted, and taught exclusively by faculty. Admitted students would enroll in two courses per semester for “non degree seeking” academic credit, at least initially.

“Academic credit is something Wesleyan takes very seriously, and it comes along with extremely rigorous expectations,” Perkins said. “We’re asking Wesleyan to make a significant investment in the sense that Wesleyan academic credit and faculty are two of our most precious resources.”

The Center is also proposing “Critical Pedagogy,” a service-learning seminar where conventional Wesleyan students will learn about incarceration as well as tutor prisoners not accepted into the credit-bearing program.

Jason Kavett ’09 started volunteering in prison his first year at Wesleyan. Since then Kavett and about 30 other students have led workshops at Cheshire and also at York Women’s Prison on subjects like anthropology, poetry and non-fiction writing.

“Those [professors] who participate will find not just excited and talented students, but also a fresh outlet to share what they do best,” he said. “I think this will happen because, while being innovative, it is really only a reflection of the kind of engagement that defines Wesleyan as an institution. The program is actually quite conventional for us.”

Birnbaum said the level of commitment of incarcerated students often surpasses that of the average Wesleyan student.

“I’ve heard stories about professors who become reinvigorated as teachers through their experience working with incarcerated students,” she said. “Professors would not be diverting attention away from the Wesleyan classroom, but rather enriching their tenure with different experiences and new ways of approaching the process of learning.”
Karpowitz and Kenner were joined by two other panelists on Monday night in the Memorial Chapel: Dr. Robert Cadigan, who directs a Prison Education Program at Boston University, and Theater Professor Ronald Jenkins, whose course “Activism and Outreach through Theater” allows Wesleyan students to perform alongside prisoners in the Connecticut Juvenile Training School and York Women’s Prison.

While all five panelists advocated the program’s implementation at Wesleyan, there were differences of opinion as to how to carry out the program, even amongst colleagues. Questions about the value—or lack thereof—of interactions between traditional students and students in prison, as well as concerns about censorship and rules were common, as well as what one panelist called “anti-training”: that is, whether or not to allow faculty to discuss their students’ own “crime and punishment.”

“The panel gave the community a chance to see a large spectrum of approaches and even politics that advocates for this program have,” Kavett said. “We saw that even though you could say there is an obvious kind of progressive politics in the background, there is no dogmatic set of beliefs one has to have to understand why the program is so compelling.”
http://wesleyanargus.com/2009/01/30/students-push-for-prison-classes/

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What does it mean to have College in Prison?
By Sylvia Ryerson
Wesleyan Argus May 1, 2009

Dear Wesleyan Faculty and Fellow Students,

In the midst of all the excitement over the near approval of a Wesleyan College in Prison pilot program for the coming academic year, I wish to take a step back to consider the possible implications of the proposed program, and to re-imagine the best way to move forward at this moment in time. [1] As a citizen and activist passionate about the urgent need to actively oppose the U.S. prison industrial complex, as a current workshop facilitator at York Prison in Niantic, CT, and as a former member of the student group working to establish the WCPE (the Wesleyan Center for Prison Education), I have become increasingly disillusioned with the Wesleyan College in Prison program. Before it is too late, I urge us as a community to give this proposal the critical attention it deserves.

The goal of the WCPE is undoubtedly a worthy one: to offer college-level courses taught by Wesleyan professors to incarcerated individuals for credit. The program is meant to take place at the Cheshire Correctional Institution in Cheshire, CT, the largest male high-security prison in the state. As the mission statement of the WCPE proposal reads, the aim is to offer courses to “those who are systematically denied access to educational opportunities,” because “we believe access to a college education should be a right for all.”

Yet in making this claim, the proposal fails by its own logic. Cheshire Prison incarcerates approximately 1,361 people. This two-year pilot program will admit fifteen students in the first year and thirty in the second year, .01 percent and .02 percent respectively of the total prison population. In order to determine who gets to participate, the project states, “we propose a rigorous application process that will evaluate reading comprehension, writing ability and critical thinking skills of potential applicants.” Thus rather than enacting the belief that college education should be a right for all, this program explicitly outlines how individuals will be judged in order to determine whether or not they are worthy of this education, by a process that will necessarily privilege those coming from more advantaged backgrounds.

Rather than allowing inmates to elect the option of attending classes, this framework perpetuates a system of denied access for a population that has already been “systematically denied access to educational opportunities,” in a space that offers few alternatives. And in admitting only .01 percent of the population, this program will re-institute a social hierarchy throughout the entire prison structured on exclusive access to privileged forms of knowledge.

This is not the only way a college in prison program can exist. This is simply the model that has been dictated to the WCPE by a grant offered from the Bard College in Prison program. In some Connecticut prisons, community colleges offer open access courses for degree-granting credit (the WCPE offers only “non-degree seeking” transferable credit, meaning that participants will not be granted Wesleyan degrees). It is possible that Wesleyan could become an ally to these programs. Another starting point could be to set up an open access lecture series at Cheshire by Wesleyan professors.

Some argue that as a pilot, this program will grow to admit more people. Between year one and year two of the pilot, the program will expand from excluding 99.99 percent of Cheshire’s population, to excluding 99.98 percent. Given these statistics, how much expansion can we truly hope for down the road? Some argue that the intense competition for admission is necessary to uphold the belief that the “same standards of academic rigor that adhere at Wesleyan can be upheld in a class taught to prison inmates.” [2] Such an argument remains entirely within the paradigm that accepts prison as a space where rehabilitation is possible – yet only allows the possibility of redemption to a select few, within the terms of the intellectual order that has created the category of their exclusion.

The significance of this decision extends far beyond the relationship between Cheshire and Wesleyan. The hope of the WCPE (as it has been explained to me) is to make this a satellite program to be replicated in colleges and prisons across the country. I see this potential national expansion as re-creating the paternalistic logic of development that offers band-aid solutions in moments of crisis, effectively diverting attention and energy from meaningful radical organizing for social change.

There are many, many more things to be said here that this space will not allow. But I want to end by saying that I deeply respect the incredible amount of work that my fellow students have put into making this program happen. I know that the hardest time to re-evaluate is when things feel so close to completion. Yet personally, I find no sense of completion in the institutionalization of a program that lacks a broader vision and strategy for how to confront and transform the present crisis of the U.S. prison system. It is a dangerous game to theorize about the horror of the prison industrial complex, and then separate this from our own involvement in its recreation – especially at a moment when we have the opportunity to begin something new.

I know that there are many people on this campus who care deeply about these issues, and for this reason I urge us to talk to each other about the significance of this proposal. It is happening now, and it is in our name.

Sincerely,
Sylvia Ryerson
[1] The proposal has passed the Educational Policy Committee (EPC), but must still be passed by a faculty vote.
[2] From the WCPE proposal.
Ryerson is a member of the class of 2009.
http://wesleyanargus.com/2009/05/01/what-does-it-mean-to-have-college-in-prison/