Some of America’s ‘Most Terrific’ Students are Behind Bars

The 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act has been in the news this fall, as Democratic nominees for president debate the pros and cons of a law which some fee was a major driver of America’s mass incarceration crisis.

About one component of the law, which eliminated Pell awards that supported higher education programs in correctional facilities across the U.S ., nonetheless, there has been little debate about its efficiency and effectiveness. Thousands of inpatients lost the chance to gain the educational skills they needed to help them find employment after release–and to successfully navigate the travel back to civil society.

A few initiatives stepped in to fill the educational void–most notably the Bard Prison Initiative( BPI ), founded in 1999 by undergraduates at Bard College in New York State, which supports college-level first-class for inpatients in six state prisons. As the momentum develops for resuscitating Pell grants for incarcerated men, a brand-new four-part PBS documentary by Ken Burns, College Behind Bars, examines the achievements of the BPI program.

The Crime Report’s Julia Pagnamenta recently spoke with Max Kenner, BPI’s founder, Jule Hall and Giovannie Hernandez, two BPI alumni featured in the film, as well as College Behind Bars director Lynn Novick and producer Sarah Botstein about the ways in which the documentary reaches beyond the BPI program to examine the failures and shortfalls of the U.S. educational system and the “moral argument” that has driven opposition to higher education in prisons, and ultimately the merits of the case of a liberal arts education.

The conversation has been edited for space and lucidity. College Behind Bars will air on neighbourhood PBS stations on Nov. 25 and Nov. 26 at 9/8 Central Time, and will be available for online streaming.

The Crime Report: Max, you say in the documentary that BPI students aren’t treated any differently than if they were students on Bard’s primary Annandale campus. Please elaborate.

Max Kenner: I think that as a college, we are in the market for terrific students. We are in the market for people who are eager to take advantage of what we have to offer, and we are proactive in trying to find those people who are otherwise not engaged by systems of higher learning, or[ by] our colleges and universities in the United Nation. It’s both somewhat obvious once you think about it, and essentially tragic.[ It’s] unbelievable, once you recognize that last challenge, and take it on, that the first, and most obvious place to look for that wasted, withdrew ability in America is our sprawling, and unbelievably oversized prison system.

TCR: In the documentary, biology prof Mike Tibbetts says his students at BPI came with a “sense of importance .” Did incarceration change your relationship to education?

Giovannie Hernandez, former BPI student: In my experience, education prior to my BPI curriculum had always been something prescriptive. You were a passive receiver of information. You were made to memorize these things. You were just basically made to take these things for awarded. However, BPI fostered you to question these things. It was not, “here take this information.” It was, “here what do you think about this information? ”

We were asked to process on our own terms. How we understood it, and sort of guide it in a way that really developed my ability to process , not only ideas, helped me understand myself and my outlook in the world much more clearly. The style I make decisions now, “its more” of a process. What is the worst thing that can happen? What is the best thing that can happen? What are the different ways that you can do this? That happens automatically now.

Jule Hall, former BPI student: The importance came from the fact that we were adult learners, and we had been removed from the opportunities that education had supported us, and then while we were incarcerated, we started to realign our values to the things that we wanted to aspire to, and we watched education as a tool for that.

Jule Hall

Jule Hall

I would say that the direction we involved the program was not with a sense of importance. We left that for Max[ Kenner] and the administrators to be concerned with. Our urgency came from the idea that I want to absorb and learn as much as I can. This is something that is beneficial to me now in the present circumstance of being incarcerated, because it gives me a brand-new view on the nations of the world, and how I could impact the nations of the world. But also we had that awareness that in the future, we will be liberated, and we wanted to be released in a manner productive for our families, as well as[ for] national societies we return to.

TCR: The political speech around educational programs in prison has changed since BPI began in 1999. There’s an increase in bipartisan support for the grants, but a 2014 initiative by Gov. Andrew Cuomo for tax-payer money educational programs in prisons was spurned. Opposings claim it would supply those convicted of crimes with a free ride paid for by taxpayers. Why is there such moral anger?

Kenner: People who led prisons, counsels, community members, and quite a few of victims’ rights organisations felt differently in the 1990 s and early 2000 s, than they do now. But there was still a general consensus of experts that college in prison, education in prison, was the best investment. So there was a disagreement in local communities that went on for quite a long time about how to answer the visceral[ opponent] you describe. It took a lot of effort to persuade our colleagues that the fact that this work is( a) inexpensive and( b) saves huge amount of fund in the future is actually unpersuasive.

College in prison at the time cost the Pell program about $35 million.( But) the same people who established that debate advocated for a bill which dedicated $10 billion to new prison structure. There was enough money in that bill to fund college for 200 years. So we couldn’t afford college, but we could afford the new prisons who really induced things worse. The vast majority of people who didn’t vote for the bill, or abstained objected to the low-toned number of dollars dedicated to prison construction. $10 billion was not enough.

“The only lane you can make real change is by persuading the public to think of people in the criminal justice system as real people .”

[ Instead] we belief the only space you can make real change in this issue is by persuading the general public to think of people ensnared in the criminal justice system, people ensnared in prisons and jails, as real people. As people who could be family members, or neighbors. The moral controversy carried the day in the 1990 s, and it will carry the day today. People do not care about money in this context; and if they tell you they do, you should know you can’t believe them.

TCR: Which delivers us to BPI’s funding. Most of it comes from private donations?

Kenner: Historically, that has been true-life. We are one of a very small handful of programs that came into being after the downfall of Pell, and we are generally privately funded. That is less true now.

TCR: Recently, there has been a call for increased scrutiny over the origins of private financing. What are your thoughts on this? Would BPI even exist if there had been adequate government funding for higher education programs in the criminal justice system?

Max Kenner

Max Kenner

Kenner: There is no question that there are pros and cons to each. We couldn’t exist and raise money the style we do if we weren’t proximate to New York City. It’s become easier to do in different places as fortune inequality has skyrocketed and there are more rich people. Anyone can make their own moral judgment, value judgments about that. Over the long term, and at any magnitude, the only way to fund these public programs is through public investments. Full and total stop.

Now if you are me, “youve had” more leverage, you have more power, you have more independence if you are raising private money. That is terrific. You don’t have to report to a legislature, or a voter, or anyone else. There are institutions that exploit programs like Pell, either for profit or not-for profit institutions that support programs that don’t really take into full account the interest or aspirations of their students. That happens. But I only want to say that we are extremely aroused and very proud that for the first time in 25 times since the Crime Bill, there has been bipartisan legislation to restore Pell eligibility for incarcerated people that is due in large part to Senator Brian Schatz from Hawaii and Mike Lee from Utah.

Investing in Prison Education

We anticipate that it will become law in one form or another in the next year or time and a half, and that is a terrific thing for the country. The reality is, when education was eviscerated in our prison systems, the pretense that our Department of Corrections was about anything corrective or rehabilitative was washed away. If there is going to be hope and intent, or any positive appreciate in these places that we invest so many resources in, college is the place to start.

TCR: Giovannie, in the documentary you said, “I don’t believe in friends in prison, but I believe in friends in my cohort, ” implying a sense of unparalleled confidence in your chap BPI students.

Hernandez: Prison is a shared common fight, and there is a certain fellowship that comes with that. My closest friends now are people I was formally incarcerated with, even out here, because those are the people who can understand me the most, and who I can understand[ the most ]. Beyond that, there is this other tier: your BPI cohort. And that’s a struggle within a struggle. Like doing college is hard out here, doing college in prison is doubly hard-handed. Not only that, but you really get to know people within class, and outside of class. BPI is a community that supports itself. I truly want to see my peers succeed, just as much as they want to see me succeed.

Jule Hall: I think it is also related to the fact that we were engaging in liberal arts. We were speaking( African-American crime writer) Walter Mosley, and some of these philosophers, and we were able to see ourselves in the works that we were reading, and understand ourselves through that read, and that’s a process, of whoever takes that jaunt with you, you are going to build an affinity with. But there existed a technological characteristic to it; it was so rigorous that we had to band together to help one another learn the material.

We studied in little study groups. We tutored one another. There were days when Giovannie helped me with Algebra, or I might help him with a newspaper, so we were all aware that we were in the same situation. And just as Giovannie described, it has transferred out here because those same relationships have been maintained, if not stirred stronger.

TCR: In the documentary, Jule, you mention that you were interested in studying German, because since World War II, Germany has been trying to amend for its” historical blunder .” What about Germany resonated with you?

Hall: Yes,[ before BPI] there was a prevailing topic amongst the circles that I was a part of, of Germany as this racist society that devoted these atrocities. Nonetheless, when I got into BPI and I insured a German magazine, it had a person of colour on the encompas, and it was talking about hip-hop. And I was like, “Wow, wait a minute, this isn’t the German society that I usually hear about.” As I dove further, I watched that Germany made efforts to make itself a multi-cultural society. I’ve learned from my the studies and learns that Germany is one of the most commendable democracies in “todays world”, and I only found that fascinating considering its past.

And what was key to that for better or worse, because it wasn’t all a smooth street,[ is that] they actively worked to establish culture better. They recognized that something happened that was wrong. How do we make amends for that? I just find that so interesting in an American context, of course, with bondage, and the ways we are moving on, but we are never acknowledging that something went wrong. How can we make amends for that?

TCR: Students these days–like their professors–rely increasingly on digital material and resources to conduct their experiment. But due to prison circumstances, BPI students do not ever providing access to computers or the internet. You had to rely exclusively on volumes and physical repositories. Jule, when you were writing your thesis, how did you steer all your search needs?

Hall: The cinema involved with this as well. The technological media that are provided in schools today are sort of a crutch. But we had to go the old-fashioned way. Look at the back of the book; encounter what interests us; find a footnote that it related to[ and] make sure that it was related to what we wanted. I likewise want to say that it required a bit of innovation , not only on our place, but of the executives. We had to test and try things in order to make things work, and I think that is what is so instructive, because that is what education is about. It’s about not just taking a normal road to achieve something, but applying your head.

Access to Textbooks

In the early stages, I would[ question] any prof, “Would you happen to have access to this book or that journal? ” But what we did eventually as things became more organic and whole in the program, we actually had people on the campus–and I want to say the campus was so supportive of us–[ where] that was their duty. We would send them a roster of books. And they would pull the books out for us from the campus.

TCR: Upon news of your impending release, Jule is filmed saying “I better brush up on my German.” At first specific comments comes off as humorous, since German language skills aren’t the first thing that comes to mind as a practical necessity to life post-incarceration. However, it tapped into a larger theme at the core of BPI. How has what you learned at BPI resonated in your lives post-incarceration?

Hernandez: What Max calls the ability to think has mapped out my trajectory since I have been home. It has helped me reacclimate to civilization. I’ve had an easier day than someone who might not have gone through BPI , is not simply because I am[ more] employable, but because I can identify certain things like nervousnes where reference is occurs.[ I can] be like, All right this is not a normal response, something is going on here. I can identify and think through that. In my professional life, having a degree…that’s gold out here.

TCR: What did you major in?

Hernandez: Literature. I should have majored in the social sciences. I am a lawsuit manager now for a non-profit. And being able to think through things, being able to identify what my clients need, how they are necessary me to show up in this interaction, that’s really on your paw. You never know how a person is going to show up, and how you have to adapt to that. So that, in a really real way, is how my education–having cultivated that ability to think promptly, to think critically–plays into my daily life.

Hall: It’s amazing how the universe works, because when I wrote my senior job there were three topics that I employed[ with ]: race, ladies, and the intersections of culture and migration. And it’s so ironic now that I am working for the Ford Foundation where those are the three lines of employment that my team commits with. We engage with decarceration, trying to reduce mass incarceration, immigrant privileges, as well as advancing gender reproductive justice, and I would have never thought that. I think it’s very important to emphasize that because we–I envision I can speak for my classmates–engaged in this material with a genuine interest, and not necessarily because we supposed this is going to be what I am going to do when I get out.

In fact, I think we had speeches about that.[ People said] I don’t know whether this is going to help me with when I get out, but it’s so interesting, and I just adoration involving with it.

A Guest Lecture Ignited the Idea

TCR: Lynn and Sarah, as the film’s director and producer, what obliged you to create a film on BPI?

Lynn Novick

Lynn Novick

Lynn Novick, Director: We got asked to give a guest lecturing in a BPI classroom, at Eastern Correctional Facility in 2012. We went into this classroom to show panoramas from our Prohibition film and talk about that story with only your median, ordinary BPI class. We didn’t know what that would be, and it was the most interesting, complicated, profound, serious conversation we had about our cinema, about Prohibition anywhere. As we were leaving, we were really impressed, and sort of astonished by the level of academic rigour about the conversation we had just had, and where it was happening, and realized that we had no idea that that existed. We sort of said to each other, Wow this would be an amazing film, but we are kind of busy. And then over day, we just decided that we just really had to stir the cinema. I taught in the program myself.

Sarah Botstein, Producer: One of the worries we had early on, and one of the challenges we faced was that we had never made a verite film together where the drama is unfolding as you are shooting. The visual landscape is the same. So every time you go[ there] you obsess, “how is this visually going to sustain an audience over day? ” And we found that not only were our cinematographers remarkable at capturing both the sameness and certain differences, but actually that played ultimately to a strength in the film rather than a weakness. We didn’t understand that when we started.

TCR: You filmed in medium and maximum security prisons in New York State. Did you have any trouble getting the correctional administration to grant you so much access to the facilities?

Novick: We had very unusual access, and we ever want to point that out, because that is partly what establishes the movie so unique. That acceptance had to come from the top of the New York State government. So on some tier it was the governor’s office and the Department of Corrections, and then in each facility it had to be interpreted and dealt with, and that was a little bit more nuanced.

“Education is an essential component of helping people through their incarceration .”

But the Department of Correction and the New York State government all understand very well that education is an essential component of helping people right through their captivity in a productive path. And they recognize that BPI is such an extraordinary program. They actually was in favour of a cinema that would show that.

TCR: College Behind Bars will expose BPI to a larger audience, to observers who may not have known it existed or realise the full extent of its educational programs. What plan outcomes do you hope this documentary elicits?

Kenner: The thing we hope it does most of all, and this was fundamental to the decision to make this documentary in the beginning, wasn’t about policy change, though we hope it moves the needle on Pell. It isn’t about fundraising, though we hope that more people that know about us find our operate appealing and perhaps supporting us at one point or another. We are dependent upon private contributions. That’s not what inspired us to do this. What stimulated us to do this is the cynicism even of many of our best and well-intentioned advocates in government, in philanthropy, even in higher education. The cynicism of the capacity of our students. The tier of expected accomplishment, and the exultation with which they go about their discover, demanded to be documented.

I can walk into a philanthropic footing and talk the working day about how well our students do,[ but] nobody belief how well they actually do until they see it for themselves. They have an idea in their brains of someone doing something mediocre and that’s just fine, and that’s a good application of fund. That’s not what happens. BPI students achieve things in undergraduate classrooms at the same level as any college in the United Nation. That says an enormous amount about not only what a squander our penitentiary system are, and is also available, but likewise how we share education resources in the United Nation. And the cynicism and dismis with which we treat young people from communities of color, but also across the board. When it comes to education the high expectations and disregard with which we treat young people in the United Commonwealth is an outrage.

There are two things I love most when I watch this documentary. The first is to think about all the ways incarcerated people are generally represented on broadcast television. Just how barbaric, and dishonest, and gratuitous those representations are, and watching this film in the purposes of the that normal is an amazing thing. Second thing I love to do when I watch this movie is, everyone is going to assume that the filmmakers picked the brightest, most articulate, most good looking attributes, just like social scientists and donors always think we just skimming the best.

When I look at their[ Novick and Botstein’s] cinema, I adoration looking in those classrooms, at all the people who aren’t major attributes, knowing how curious and ambitious, and articulate and generous, all of them are. We could have picked two or three more castings that would have been just as good as different groups in the film , not over the twenty years of doing the project,[ but] at the moment the film was being produced.

Novick: As it happens when we started the cinema[ in 2014 ], this didn’t definitely sounds like a front and centre issue, and now it’s much more in our national conversation, and that’s really exciting. The film can help maybe inform the conversation at the minimum, and drive citizens to ask, “Why don’t we have more[ education programs] in a facility or in a state? ” Just questioning our public officials about what they are doing.

That’s a good start. Our lead institutions of higher learning that have immense endowments–what are they do with all that money, and who are they educating? Who are they deeming worthy of their intellectual gifts? Those are big questions.

TCR: When the BPI debate team won against Harvard in 2015, it built international headlines. The documentary demonstrates a few headlines and clips, however, that turned Harvard’s loss against BPI into a joke, solidifying this narrative of underestimation that the general public has of incarcerated people.

Kenner: When that happened there was enormous, global fanfare, and there was very little pushback of[ the kind] you were alluding to before, and that astonished me. In this area, we have a history of scare the crap out of our own shadow a little. It taught me something about how we think about these issues in the United States.

One of the first things you learn is how much people like to see Harvard lose. That was real, and you can’t talk about it without mentioning that, but likewise speaking about cynicism, how normally in the United States when we talk about increasing educational access or opportunity, particularly when we talk about doing it for free, the thing that people hear in their minds is that we are providing some kind of handout, or that we are lowering standards to provide something for people that they haven’t earned. And the symbolism of overcoming in an objectively judged debate the most prestigious, and famous, and elite university in the United State, signals to people implicitly that this was not a handout, that the education was real, and the accomplishments were genuine, and therefore in that context, that kind of resentment melted away. It was a terrific lesson.

Botstein:[ After the Harvard debate] I left with the Harvard children because we wanted to interview them outside of prison. I was searching for my phone to say, “They won, they won! ” And then I recollect talking to Max[ Kenner ], like what is going to happen? And then all over the world exploded, so “hes just” genuinely an adventure in the process of inducing the cinema. And then we are genuinely had to make sure we didn’t tip-off the scale too much. That the debate is really a great part of BPI, but what happens on the classroom is actually the backbone of what happens at BPI. You don’t want to overdo it, like BPI is a college with a great debate team. BPI is a great college, and like other great colleges it has a debate team. Just like it has an alumni party, just like it has a play. And that’s an important distinction.

TCR: In the documentary, one of the BPI professors, who also teaches at the main Bard campus, Donna Ford Grover, says of BPI students, “It’s like teach graduate students.”

Kenner: Sure, people are grownups.

TCR: It is not just that they are grownups. BPI students likewise come in with a different determined of suffers.

Max Kenner: I anticipate the same reasons we get such terrific faculty, and why so many wonderful teachers and professors want to teach for us, is because they recognize instantaneously when they are in one of our classrooms, how much is at stake for our students. Students bring a sense of gravitation, and want, and ambition and hunger, to those classrooms that[ faculty] are unaccustomed to, and that is absolutely riveting and terrific if you as a faculty member, if you as an intellectual or professor, also think so much is at stake.

Julia Pagnamenta is a contributing writer at The Crime Report. She welcomes comments from readers.

Read more: thecrimereport.org

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