education behind bars
The Bard College Prison Initiative
By Nazneen Malik
The brainchild of Max Kenner, the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI),
was created in 1999 to address the educational needs of prisoners
and to provide them with the opportunity and the means to attain
higher education while remaining within the correctional system.
To understand the logic behind such a program as BPI, one
must revisit the 1970s, a time when the federal government
looked favorably upon college in prison programs. Since then,
numerous studies have shown that college in prison programs
reduce the rate of recidivism, lower the number of violent
incidents that occur within prisons, re-establish broken relationships
between incarcerated parents and their children, and create
a general sense of hope among inmates. Despite these beneficial
consequences, in 1994, President Clinton signed the Violent
Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act into law, essentially
abrogating federal support and funding for existing programs.
As a result, of the 350 programs that had arisen, only three
remained.
“The prison system is so large,” Kenner muses, “because
it locks people up at a young age, and when they return home,
they are less equipped to work, to attend school, and to function
as social beings.” These deficiencies result in an increased
chance that released prisoners will commit another crime of
a greater magnitude, thereby paving the road back to prison,
but this time for a much longer sentence.
As an undergraduate
of Bard College, Kenner immersed himself in the prevailing
culture of social justice advocacy on campus. In 1999, he
and a group of like-minded individuals made the unsettling
discovery that of the 72,000 men and women in the New York
State prison system, four out of every five inmates were
from New York City. Armed with this finding, and an increasing
frustration with governmental divestment from education in
social services, the group set out to tackle the issue of educating
prison inmates. “We felt that if we were really going
to commit ourselves to some kind of effort to improve social
justice it should be broad-based, and it should be based on
public institutions,” explains Kenner.
With that in mind, Kenner embarked on a mission to make Bard
College an institutional home that would allow either faculty
or students to gain access to prisons by lending its transcript
services and by offering credit bearing courses and degrees
to prison inmates.
After the national collapse of the college in prison programs,
however, there was an incredible distrust among people in corrections
who wanted to see the colleges come back and people in higher
education who wanted colleges in the prison. According to Kenner,
colleges only wanted to offer courses if could make a profit
or if they could do so under ideal circumstances. Some colleges
were simply not interested.
It took Kenner one
and a half years to begin working with prisons. He was able
to organize student volunteer programs that allowed students
to conduct writing, GED, literacy, and theology workshops
within the prison. “By the spring
of my senior year, we had some 40 students volunteering at
the prison on a weekly basis. Many of them said that it was
the single most profound and influential thing that they had
done at their time at Bard,” says Kenner.
Upon graduation, Kenner made a proposal to Bard College President,
Leon Botstein, requesting that the college provide him with
an office and grant him access to its transcripts so that they
could begin offering college credit to prison inmates. The
only stipulation was that Kenner would have to find a way to raise money to support the program.
Following
graduation, Kenner was given a salaried position by Episcopal
Social Services (EPS). “The Bard Prison Initiative officially started
as a partnership between EPS and Bard College,” says
Kenner, “and five months later, in 2001, we began offering
credit bearing courses to 17 students.”
Since
then, the program has continued to expand. In the fall, two
more prisons, one of which is a women’s prison, will
be joining BPI and is expected to have about 125 enrolled
students. BPI employs a blind admissions procedure and tuition
for the program is completely waived by the college. Through
grants, BPI acquires enough funding to enroll 15 students
per facility in any given year.
Currently, BPI offers
two educational programs to inmates. Anyone with a GED can
apply for the pre-college program and those with a higher
level of education can apply for the Associate’s
degree program. In the fall, BPI will begin offering a Bachelor’s
program that is consistent with the degree conferred to Bard
College students. Those who have successfully completed the
associate’s degree program in two or three years can
then reapply for admission into the bachelor’s degree
program.
Kenner hopes that the programs that have been implemented
thus far will remain active and prove to be self-sustaining.
He remains a passionate advocate for the return of college
in prison programs and will continue to play an integral role
in enhancing their opportunities.#
