Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: College in Prison
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY:
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COUNTRY:
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http://bpi.bard.edu/who-we-are/ * http://www.levyinstitute.org/scholars/daniel-karpowitz * https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/03/02/qa-author-book-about-college-prison
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2016040554
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2016040554
HEADING: Karpowitz, Daniel
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670 __ |a College in prison, 2017: |b eCIP t.p. (Daniel Karpowitz) data view screen (Director of policy and academics for the Bard Prison Initiative and lecturer in law and the humanities at Bard College)
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:University of Pennsylvania, B.A. (summa cum laude); University of Chicago, J.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
University of California, Berkeley, instructor; Bard College, Levy Economics Institute research associate, director of policy and academics for the Bard Prison Initiative, and lecturer, 2001—. Soros Justice Fellow, Open Society Institute; fellow, National Endowment for the Humanities; Fulbright fellow.
MEMBER:Phi Beta Kappa.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Daniel Karpowitz earned his bachelor’s degree at the University of Pennsylvania and his law degree at the University of Chicago. He continued his academic career as an instructor at the University of California, Berkeley, and then joined the faculty at Bard College. Since 2001, Karpowitz has served as director of policy and academics for the Bard Prison Initiative, which brings liberal arts college programs into several prisons throughout New York state. Discussing his interest in prison college programs in an Inside Higher Ed Online interview with Emily Tate, Karpowitz noted: “I long had a desire to have one foot in the academy and one foot outside of it. Throughout law school I mixed serious graduate work in the humanities and social sciences with an interest in constitutionalism and civil rights. It was [the University of] Chicago in the late ’90s, and I was introduced to the facts about mass incarceration by faculty and politicians connected to the university. Some of them suggested I work on a successful community-based alternative to incarceration back in my native Philadelphia.” He added: “Later, after stints in the rhetoric department at [the University of California, Berkeley] and work on justice mapping in NYC, when I first got up to Bard, the dean introduced me to the person who was starting the college in prison project, and we really saw things eye to eye—that this was work that was first and foremost about a love of learning, and a belief that brains and talent are everywhere.”
With his first book, College in Prison: Reading in an Age of Mass Incarceration, Karpowitz combines extensive research and his own personal experience. Anecdotes and scholarly research create a comprehensive and nuance portrait of college prison initiatives, and the book includes observations from inmates and academics alike. Along the way, Karpowitz touches on the connection between race and incarceration rates, as well as the administrative challenges of running a prison education program. The author additionally comments on notable classroom sessions and a prison graduation ceremony, sharing lessons learned along the way. Furthermore, Karpowitz addresses the low academic expectations placed on most inmates (both before and after incarceration).
Reviews of College in Prison were predominantly positive, and New York Journal of Books Online columnist Christopher Zoukis observed: “Like an infectious disease, the prison taints everything it comes into contact with. But any college program in a prison must still endeavor to separate from the prison as much as possible. As BPI students demonstrate, even an imperfect distinction between college and prison leads to some incredible outcomes.” Zoukis went on to state that the book “is a powerful argument for the use of college in prison as well as an engrossing story of the prisoner-participants in the Bard Prison Initiative and their success. A must-read for any educator or anyone interested in better understanding the transcendental power of higher education.” Charles R. Larson on the Counter Punch website commented the book as well, asserting: “If you seek inspiration in these depressing times, if you need one iota of decency to keep you going, if you despair that Donald Trump’s lack of humility will permeate every aspect of our culture, search no further. Read Daniel Karpowitz’s stirring commitment to higher education in prisons in New York State. Forget all the naysayers who believe that prison should only be punishment (a guarantee for recidivism). Read Karpowitz’s illuminating account of Bard College’s decade long program to give offenders a second chance in their lives. ” In the words of New York Review of Books Online correspondent Jonathan Zimmerman, “Despite the noble efforts of prison educators—and the undeniable benefits of their work, for prisoners and for society writ large—we cannot expect the voting public to approve many expenditures that would substantially improve inmates’ lives. Private efforts, or some intervention by American colleges such as Bard, may be the only way to save prisoners from the living hell in which our democracy has entombed them.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, November 7, 2016, “Higher Education behind Bars.”
ONLINE
Bard Prison Initiative Website, http://bpi.bard.edu/ (July 10, 2017), author profile.
Counter Punch, https://www.counterpunch.org/ (March 31, 2017), Charles R. Larson, review of College in Prison: Reading in an Age of Mass Incarceration.
Inside Higher Ed Online, https://www.insidehighered.com/ (July 10, 2017), Emily Tate, author interview.
New York Journal of Books, http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/ (July 10, 2017), Christopher Zoukis, review of College in Prison.
New York Review of Books, https://www.nybooks.com/ (February 23, 2017), Jonathan Zimmerman, review of College in Prison.*
Daniel B. Karpowitz is Director of Policy and Academics for the Bard Prison Initiative and Lecturer in Law & the Humanities at Bard College. Karpowitz has served as a faculty member, director, and leader of BPI since 2001. He has been responsible for major curricular and academic design and decision-making. Karpowitz was the co-founder of the Consortium for the Liberal Arts in Prison, an organization dedicated to supporting college-in-prison programs throughout the country. He also works as a higher education and criminal justice policy consultant to develop governmental reform proposals. Karpowitz has written and spoken extensively on criminal justice and the benefits of higher education in prison. He was a Soros Justice Fellow at the Open Society Institute, a Fellow at the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a Fulbright Fellow in Kathmandu, Nepal.
Karpowitz holds a J.D. with Honors from the University of Chicago Law School, where he was a Public Interest Law Fellow. He also earned a B.A., Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude, from the University of Pennsylvania.
Scholars
Research Associate Daniel Karpowitz is visiting assistant professor of political studies at Bard College. Karpowitz holds a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School, where he studied on a public interest fellowship. As a Fulbright Scholar in Nepal, he worked on constitutional and property rights, and later taught in the Rhetoric Department at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2003, Karpowitz received a Soros Justice Fellowship for his work with the Bard Prison Initiative, of which he is currently director of policy and academics.
See all Daniel Karpowitz's Publications
Contact
Daniel Karpowitz
Daniel Karpowitz
Research Associate
Levy Economics Institute of Bard College
Blithewood
Annandale-on-Hudson NY US 12504-5000
Fax: 845-758-1149
E-mail: karpo@bard.edu
'College in Prison'
New book tells the story of initiative that brings liberal arts education to incarcerated men and women.
By Emily Tate
March 2, 2017
7 COMMENTS
If given the opportunity to pursue a demanding college education, anyone -- even society’s most isolated, stigmatized individuals -- can rise to the occasion.
That’s the idea behind College in Prison: Reading in an Age of Mass Incarceration (Rutgers University Press), a new book by Daniel Karpowitz about the ways that a liberal arts education can transform the lives of people living behind bars. In the book, Karpowitz, professor of law and the humanities at Bard College and a director of the Bard Prison Initiative, reflects on his 15-year history with the Bard prison program and reveals many of the intricacies, challenges and rewards that have come with it.
Since 2001, the initiative has delivered a liberal arts education -- including courses on anthropology, literature, political science, history and the Mandarin language -- to hundreds of prisoners in the United State. These courses come with a rigorous curriculum and stimulating classroom discussions, and for some, the degrees they earn offer the chance for a better job -- a better life -- after prison.
Since its inception, the BPI has partnered with a number of liberal arts colleges across the country, in hopes of allowing more prisoners to participate in what has been a powerful, even life-changing, experience for many.
Inside Higher Ed had a chance to talk with Karpowitz about the book. His emailed responses are below.
Q: In College in Prison, you say this has been your calling for the last 20 years or so. What, exactly, drew you into this work? Can you describe when and how you first became interested?
A: I long had a desire to have one foot in the academy and one foot outside of it. Throughout law school I mixed serious graduate work in the humanities and social sciences with an interest in constitutionalism and civil rights. It was [the University of] Chicago in the late '90s, and I was introduced to the facts about mass incarceration by faculty and politicians connected to the university. Some of them suggested I work on a successful community-based alternative to incarceration back in my native Philadelphia. Later, after stints in the rhetoric department at [the University of California, Berkeley] and work on justice mapping in NYC, when I first got up to Bard, the dean introduced me to the person who was starting the college in prison project, and we really saw things eye to eye -- that this was work that was first and foremost about a love of learning, and a belief that brains and talent are everywhere: it was passion for college and an unusual mix of democratic faith and high-status aspirations for students. The criminal justice intervention was a crucial but secondary concern. I felt at home at once.
Q: Do the college professors teach, evaluate or treat the students in prison differently from students in traditional classrooms, and if so, how? What is it like for you, personally, to teach college-level courses to prison inmates?
A: We and the faculty do a remarkable dance treating all students the same, while addressing the particular needs of students bursting with talent, brains and ambition, but who have so long been failed by their formal institutions of learning. Students get a lot of support and “remediation,” but with almost no formal course work segregated into a remedial or developmental track. It’s creative, challenging, rigorous liberal arts from day one, and the development of skills is woven into that along the way. It makes it more demanding, perhaps, for both faculty and students, but since everyone is so turned on, it seems to work. If anything, I’d say the standards have to be higher at the prison campus, since the graduates will always be scrutinized more in their future academic and professional lives. It’s not fair, perhaps, but it’s the reality. Beyond that, faculty, courses, curricula and standards are almost identical on Bard’s conventional and BPI campuses. In addition to BPI, I’ve taught at the law campus in Kathmandu, to rhetoric majors at Berkeley, and many times at Bard’s main campus. I know it’s sort of sacrilegious to say, but I find the similarities among students as important if not more so than their differences.
Q: The Bard Prison Initiative aims to connect prison inmates with a college education. What advantage do these prisoners have from taking classes and pursuing an education through a liberal arts college specifically?
A: Same as anyone else. A former dean of the law school at Notre Dame who has supported the college in prison project there said to me once, “As an undergrad, as a law student and later, after my wife died and I went back to join the priesthood, Notre Dame helped me define my purpose in life. That’s what any great university should do, and that’s what Bard does for students through BPI.” That sounded right to me -- people need to be turned on and they need to find a purpose in life. Above all, they need to come to realize -- through the joys of hard-won accomplishments -- just how much the world has to offer them, and just how much they have to offer the world. That’s a pretty good start, I think, of a definition of a liberal arts education.
Q: The BPI has partnered with a number of other colleges to bring education to prisoners in other areas of the country. How successful have these partnerships been? What are your short- and long-term goals for scaling the program?
A: By and large they’ve been very successful: hundreds of students across the country going to first-rate colleges and universities, when beforehand they had no opportunity for higher education at all. All of these programs have credits and transcripts, all have or are working toward multiple degree programs, and all share a passion for the liberal arts as well as a commitment to a life after college of professional and academic achievement for their alumni -- that is commensurate with not with having done time in prison, but with having graduated from a great American institution of higher education. I’d say that at BPI our short-term goals are to find ever more colleges and universities prepared to take the modest moral risk of saying that this sort of work is indeed part of their mission, that they celebrate their own place in the meritocracy of American higher education but also know full well that this meritocracy has deep, even grave flaws. So our short-term goal is further expansion. But long term it’s continuing to shatter expectations of what students are capable of, and changing the habits of great schools about where great students can be found, and at which moments in life.
Q: At this point, you’ve read thousands of essays from prisoners seeking entrance into college. What themes have emerged from those essays? What have the many different voices of those prisoners taught you -- whether it's about mass incarceration, higher education or something else entirely?
A: That’s a great question, and one I have to admit I’m really not ready to answer. I’m certain several of my colleagues on the faculty would have eloquent and exceptionally insightful things to say right now and will be furious with me for dodging. But I’ll offer this, at least: for all the great diversity of voices, I’m always reminded -- not taught so much as reminded -- about how keen insight is a faculty that almost all people have within in them, and that college is just a place to cultivate it and take up one’s collective inheritances, and so on. The application essays, regardless of formal literacy, are often full of intellect and insight. One thing we also remark on often is how diverse and accomplished are the modes of what we might call informal literacy: the reading and writing and journaling that people do that have nothing to do with school or college.
Q: A 2013 study by the RAND Corporation found that inmates who enroll in correctional education are 43 percent less likely to return to prison within the following three years than are those who don't enroll in such programs. Based on your anecdotal experience, does that seem about right? What has it been like to see inmates leave prison and find secure, skilled jobs in the work force because of the Bard Prison Initiative?
A: The rate of recidivism at BPI, after 15 years, is about 4 percent for those who participate and 2 percent for those who complete a degree. The baselines are very high: recidivism is typically from 20 to 40 percent. There are many ways to measure and mismeasure these effects, but there’s no question that engagement in higher education correlates with profound reductions in recidivism. Of course, the highest reductions come from academic programs that do absolutely nothing intentional to reduce recidivism. No good college or university cares about such an outcome, nor should it. Indeed, the only way to fully reap the benefits of college in prison is if the college sticks to what it knows best: teaching and cultivating the higher learning of its students. The other “policy benefits” will follow. A college, or a public policy, that tries to turn education into a recidivism-reduction device will have done irreversible damage to what is otherwise a very precious opportunity.
Read more byEmily Tate
DANIEL KARPOWITZ is the director of policy and academics for the Bard Prison Initiative and lecturer in law and the humanities at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. He is the cofounder of the Consortium for the Liberal Arts in Prison, an organization that launches and cultivates college-in-prison programs across the country, and he has also been a Soros Justice Fellow at the Open Society Institute, a fellow at the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a Fulbright Fellow in Kathmandu, Nepal.
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Print Marked Items
Higher education behind bars
Publishers Weekly.
263.45 (Nov. 7, 2016): p53.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Bard Prison Initiative receives a thorough treatment in these two books.
College in Prison: Reading in an Age of Mass Incarceration
Daniel Karpowitz. Rutgers Univ., $24.95 (208p) ISBN 978-0-81358412-6
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Debut author Karpowitz explores the value of liberal arts education and the nature of incarceration as the two strands
join in the Bard Prison Initiative, a college-in-prison program that specifically aims to recreate the liberal arts college
experience in multiple prisons in New York. His account draws on his personal experience as an instructor and
administrator in the program. Karpowitz moves between scholarly examinations and novelistic narrative recreations of
his classes that allow the students' voices (albeit filtered) to be heard. The structure of the narrative fluctuates,
sometimes connecting general themes such as the relationship between race and incarceration to specific classroom
sessions and student experiences, while at other times only recounting significant past events, such as the first fullscale
graduation ceremony. The book feels like it can't quite decide on a genre. Karpowitz falls a bit into the
memoirist's trap of having every ordinary classroom session and conversation include a teachable moment or student
epiphany. Taken as a whole, however, these stories provide a fresh representation of the imprisoned, highlighting their
heterogeneity and humanity and convincing the reader to fight against "the well-meaning but insidious bigotry of low
expectations." (Feb.)
Liberating Minds: The Case for College in Prison
Ellen Condliffe Lagemann. New Press, $26.95 (256p) ISBN 978-162097-059-1
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Lagemann, a former dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Distinguished Fellow of the Bard
Prison Initiative at Bard College in N.Y., argues that providing prisoners with a college education is good for both
prisoners and society. College education helps the formerly incarcerated cope with the shame of having been
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imprisoned, communicate with their families, and increase opportunities for employment, and such programs also help
society by lowering recidivism, incarceration costs, and the crime rate. In response to conflicting research about
recidivism, Lagemann argues, persuasively, that these studies were either flawed or based on older, coercive models of
prison education. She claims that self-directed programs in which prisoners have control over when and what they
learn are effective. There is a particular focus on the Bard Prison Iniative, but other programs are mentioned too,
including the Freedom Education Project Puget Sound at the Washington Correctional Facility for Women and the
Prison University Project at San Quentin in California. Lagemann includes intensive research, but her most powerful
supporting evidence comes from the anecdotes of former prisoners who have become published poets, social workers,
and nonprofit leaders. (Feb.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Higher education behind bars." Publishers Weekly, 7 Nov. 2016, p. 53. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA469757530&it=r&asid=ac0be117deafe7b7959e49fd67d97e6b.
Accessed 30 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A469757530
College in Prison: Reading in an Age of Mass Incarceration
Image of College in Prison: Reading in an Age of Mass Incarceration
Author(s):
Daniel Karpowitz
Release Date:
January 12, 2017
Publisher/Imprint:
Rutgers University Press
Pages:
160
Buy on Amazon
Reviewed by:
Christopher Zoukis
“A must-read for any educator or anyone interested in better understanding the transcendental power of higher education.”
Two American institutions not typically found in the same conversation are the state penitentiary and the undergraduate college. Indeed, what these two institutions offer seem to be antithetical to each other: bondage and freedom, punishment and reward, failure and success. The prison occupies a space and the college occupies a space, and never the two shall meet, right?
Wrong.
Post-secondary education has a tortured history in the American prison, but a history nonetheless. For decades, scholars and policy makers recognized the value of educating the incarcerated. Advanced studies were acknowledged as the one program in prison that worked to consistently provide measurable improvements in the one piece of data on the minds of all players in the criminal justice system: recidivism. But public sentiment turned against the idea of educating prisoners, federal legislation ended the Pell grants that made it possible, and college all but disappeared from the prison.
All was not lost, however. In his new book, College in Prison: Reading in an Age of Mass Incarceration, director of policy and academics for the Bard Prison Initiative and lecturer at Bard College Daniel Karpowitz tells the story of the Bard Prison Initiative, which has successfully brought college back into the prison. Along the way, Karpowitz makes a strong case for the value of a liberal arts education in the prison setting.
The Bard Prison Initiative brought an elite, liberal arts college program directly into the prison system in New York. The program eschewed many of the trappings of the more typical educational opportunities available in prisons. BPI's program is not vocational in nature. Participants do not learn specific job skills or prepare to work in a specific trade. The courses are all college-level, challenging and count toward a degree. As Karpowitz notes, the work involved in the Bard Prison Initiative program firmly avoids the "insidious bigotry" of low expectations.
But is offering prisoners a college education the right thing to do?
From the perspective of recidivism rates, the answer is a resounding "yes." Bard Prison Initiative graduates recidivate at a rate of four percent. National recidivism rates hover in the 50 percent range. If the goal is to keep prisoners from returning to prison, it seems that a BPI-style college education works.
Karpowitz goes much further than such simplistic analysis, however. From the perspective of a skilled educator, he considers the value of a liberal arts education on a much grander scale. Why is such an education important for anyone? What is the value of a college education?
The stories of BPI students and the classroom experiences related by Karpowitz reveal the true value of education. There is much inspiration to be found in reading of the success of prisoners who, through Bard Prison Initiative's liberal arts education, opened their minds and learned to think. Reading the engrossing story of BPI students confirms the inherent value of education, in and of itself.
This argument resonates in Karpowitz's writing. He acknowledges that college in prison will not solve the problem of mass incarceration. But, he notes, "the college inside the prison is an important political space, with implications for the nation at large, even as we work to reduce our generation's overuse of prisons." Providing a liberal arts college education to one of the most marginalized populations in the country makes a tremendous difference in the lives of those prisoners. And the undeniable benefits of a college education spread beyond the prisoner in an exponential manner. Families and entire communities benefit.
Unfortunately, as Otto Kirscheimer once said, "all public policy is irrational, but none is as irrational as criminal justice policy." To Karpowitz, the college in prison experience must be a college, not a prison experience. That is a tall order in today's command and control style prisons. There appears to be room for vocational education, job training and other programs of marginal value, but not for the truly life-changing experience of college, taught by real professors (not poorly trained prison staff or fellow prisoners), involving real work (not dumbed down for a prisoner) and granting an actual degree from a respected institution of higher learning.
Karpowitz goes to great lengths to make this important point. In order to be successful, college in prison programs must replicate the college experience as closely as possible. They cannot, and should not, be thought of as therapeutic programming for the criminal minded individual. Success should not be measured traditionally—recidivism rates should not be used to judge the efficacy of college in prison. This is partly because a college education in prison cannot cure the ills of criminal behavior and incarceration on a large scale, and partly because the goal of college in prison should be the provision of a high quality education and nothing more. To go further renders the prison and college indistinguishable from one another.
This is, of course, nearly impossible. At one point, Karpowitz wonders whether the prison setting distorts and perverts the relationship between a liberal arts college and its (prisoner) students. The answer is simple: of course it does. Like an infectious disease, the prison taints everything it comes into contact with. But any college program in a prison must still endeavor to separate from the prison as much as possible. As BPI students demonstrate, even an imperfect distinction between college and prison leads to some incredible outcomes.
College in Prison is a powerful argument for the use of college in prison as well as an engrossing story of the prisoner-participants in the Bard Prison Initiative and their success. A must-read for any educator or anyone interested in better understanding the transcendental power of higher education.
Christopher Zoukis is a prison education advocate and the author of College for Convicts: The Case for Higher Education In American Prisons as well as several other titles. He has twice won the PEN American Center Prison writing award for drama and for fiction. He is currently incarcerated in a federal prison with his release expected in late 2018, by then having served 12 continuous years. Upon release he plans to attend law school and become a federal criminal defense attorney.
College in Prison: Reading in an Age of Mass Incarceration
Daniel Karpowitz. Rutgers Univ., $24.95 (208p) ISBN 978-0-8135-8412-6
Debut author Karpowitz explores the value of liberal arts education and the nature of incarceration as the two strands join in the Bard Prison Initiative, a college-in-prison program that specifically aims to recreate the liberal arts college experience in multiple prisons in New York. His account draws on his personal experience as an instructor and administrator in the program. Karpowitz moves between scholarly examinations and novelistic narrative recreations of his classes that allow the students’ voices (albeit filtered) to be heard. The structure of the narrative fluctuates, sometimes connecting general themes such as the relationship between race and incarceration to specific classroom sessions and student experiences, while at other times only recounting significant past events, such as the first full-scale graduation ceremony. The book feels like it can’t quite decide on a genre. Karpowitz falls a bit into the memoirist’s trap of having every ordinary classroom session and conversation include a teachable moment or student epiphany. Taken as a whole, however, these stories provide a fresh representation of the imprisoned, highlighting their heterogeneity and humanity and convincing the reader to fight against “the well-meaning but insidious bigotry of low expectations.” (Feb.)
Scholars Behind Bars
Jonathan Zimmerman FEBRUARY 23, 2017 ISSUE
College in Prison: Reading in an Age of Mass Incarceration
by Daniel Karpowitz
Rutgers University Press, 208 pp., $24.95
Liberating Minds: The Case for College in Prison
by Ellen Condliffe Lagemann
New Press, 228 pp., $26.95
Notes from the Field
a one-woman show written and performed by Anna Deavere Smith and directed by Leonard Foglia
Second Stage Theatre’s Tony Kiser Theatre, New York City, November 2–December 18, 2016
Anna Deavere Smith in Notes from the Field, her play about American education and the criminal justice system, which she performed at the American Repertory Theater, Cambridge, Massachusetts, before the production came to New York
Evgenia Eliseeva
Anna Deavere Smith in Notes from the Field, her play about American education and the criminal justice system, which she performed at the American Repertory Theater, Cambridge, Massachusetts, before the production came to New York
American higher education has to deal much with bad news, as any quick scan of the country’s front pages will confirm: skyrocketing costs, runaway debt, sexual violence, and sluggish students more interested in partying than learning. But consider the following description of Bard College students, by one of their professors:
Students report that classes are “totally absorbing,” which is clearly evident in the classrooms. The intensity of student engagement is seen in the consistently lively class discussions. The study rooms are always full. In one-on-one conversations with faculty, students often report having read several more books than the ones assigned in order to investigate the topics at hand more deeply. They regularly ask for comments on essays they have written not for class, but just to express their views about someone running for office or an event in the news. On occasion, they buttonhole professors to talk about some particularly challenging philosophical puzzle they have been contemplating, such as how one knows what is and is not fair. Others have wanted to discuss an idea they have for a book they want to write or an organization they hope to establish once they are home.
That’s not the kind of intellectual atmosphere you will find on most American campuses. But these students aren’t on Bard’s campus; they’re in jail. The tribute to them comes from Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, distinguished fellow at the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI), which provides college education to inmates at several high-security penitentiaries in upstate New York. The project was founded in 1999 by Max Kenner, an undergraduate at the time, with the backing of Bard’s president, Leon Botstein. Lagemann’s evocative book makes a convincing “case for college in prison,” to quote its title, carefully documenting the great many benefits that its graduates receive from BPI.
So does a second account by Daniel Karpowitz, the academic director of BPI and cofounder of a national network to promote liberal arts education in prisons. At the same time, both books also remind us how far our higher-education system has strayed from the humanistic ideal at the heart of the Bard prison project. By any conceivable measure, the education that these inmates receive is vastly superior to the standard academic experience of the roughly 20 million undergraduates in the United States. So these books also serve as an indirect criticism of mass higher education, not just mass incarceration.
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What is college for? American higher education began as a narrow religious and moral project, preparing a small subset of young men for upright lives in this world and the one everlasting. But it has evolved into a colossal vocational enterprise, which promises to yield gainful employment for its increasing variety of eager customers. Whether a college degree will lead to upper-middle-class jobs is one of the most hotly contested questions in American social sciences right now.1 But for prisoners, the practical advantages of a college education are impossible to deny. Only 2 percent of BPI graduates return to jail, as opposed to about half of released prisoners nationwide. Even more importantly, BPI alumni make vital and often unexpected contributions to their communities upon their return. In their prison classes, they talk about working as youth advocates, counselors, and teachers. And once they are home, that’s mostly what they do.
There are in fact only a limited number of college-in-prison programs in the US. The 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, signed by President Clinton, prohibited inmates from obtaining federal Pell Grants to cover tuition costs. Almost anyone receiving a college degree in prison today relies on private initiatives like BPI, which has raised impressive amounts of foundation money.
Lagemann links the decline of college prison programs to the punitive spirit of criminal justice over the past several decades and to the simultaneous drop in public commitment to higher education. Since the 1960s, America has incarcerated more people—and for longer periods of time—than at any time in its history, and more than any other nation on earth. Many criminals were seen as beyond rehabilitation, so the only seemingly reasonable thing to do was to lock them up for many years. And even as states and the federal government plowed more money into prisons, they cut funds for colleges and universities. They also slashed student aid, shifting the cost burden from grants to loans—that is, from public to private hands. The imprisoning widened, and the educational state withered.
Incarceration is fed by our failing K-12 schools, as well. That is the theme of Notes from the Field, Anna Deavere Smith’s recent performance piece Off-Broadway, in which Smith assumes the voices of a school principal, a teacher, and a student as well as of several inmates. Her message is stark, and almost unspeakably sad: if you take young people from hardscrabble homes and place them in underfunded and poorly run schools, a high fraction of them will wind up in jail. But there are hopeful stories, too. The most affecting character in Smith’s roster is Denise Dodson, an inmate in Maryland and a student in a prison education program run by Goucher College.
Like Bard, Goucher offers full undergraduate degrees in prison. Dodson seems transformed by her coursework. “I guess I can say that I just wasn’t connecting to everything,” Dodson says, reflecting on her life before prison, “because I wasn’t given enough information to know that we are all connected somehow.” Just as a poor education transports people into prison, a rich one can transform them beyond it.
Our prison population leveled off during the Obama years, as recession-strapped legislators looked for new ways to trim budgets. And the number of students attending college or university continued to grow, assisted by Obama’s expansion of tuition tax credits and his provision of direct government loans to replace the private banks that served (and sometimes gouged) student borrowers.
Yet there doesn’t seem to be any more public sentiment on behalf of college for prisoners than there was before. Obama did initiate a small program in 2015 to get around the Pell Grant prohibition, and this is expected to provide federal student aid to 12,000 inmates. But the “experimental” tag of this effort also indicated that it had tenuous political status. Indeed, as Republicans and Democrats agree to reduce the number of prisoners and their associated tax burden, life might become even more miserable for the people who remain behind bars. Reserving prison for “the worst offenders” makes it tougher to make any kind of case for assisting them. And many Americans—probably most Americans—are offended by the idea of devoting their tax dollars to the education of supposedly hardened criminals.
To their credit, neither Lagemann nor Karpowitz romanticizes the students in BPI. Almost all of them are in prison for committing acts of violence, not for drug violations or other so-called victimless crimes. Not surprisingly, many of them also lack more than the rudiments of basic literacy. But in the era of “college for all,” it turns out that prisoners want a degree as much as, and maybe more than, anyone else. Some of the most poignant passages in Lagemann’s book describe prisoners’ repeated efforts to gain admission to the Bard program, which requires a written test as well as an interview. Only one of ten applicants is admitted, but some inmates keep trying—as many as eight times—until they get in.
Students of the Bard Prison Initiative attending a calculus class at Eastern New York Correctional Facility, Napanoch, New York
Pete Mauney
Students of the Bard Prison Initiative attending a calculus class at Eastern New York Correctional Facility, Napanoch, New York
Bard commits to giving them a rigorous college education but not “remediation,” the catch-up instruction that many of our universities provide for students who don’t have the skills that high schools are supposed to provide. Instead, BPI students are presented with guides to grammar and usage upon admission. They pass these books around the prison yard, where students help each other master the rules of sentence structure and verb conjugation. It’s up to them—and not help from Bard—to acquire the basic proficiency they didn’t receive in school.
Nor does Bard tailor its curriculum to their expected future vocations, another characteristic of contemporary higher education. Most American undergraduates major in so-called “practical” fields—business, computer science, communication, education, and so on—rather than in the liberal arts. In part, that trend reflects the preferences of students: as an annual survey of freshmen has demonstrated, rising numbers of young people value financial and job security over other educational goals.2 The same trend has also been encouraged by politicians like Florida governor Rick Scott and former North Carolina governor Pat McCrory, who both suggested that their states shouldn’t assist students who choose to major in the humanities or social sciences. (McCrory: “I don’t want to subsidize that if that’s not going to get someone a job.”)3
Even President Obama suggested a similar view, telling a 2014 audience that “folks can make a lot more, potentially, with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree.” Obama later withdrew the remark, but even his apology spoke volumes about popular perceptions of the liberal arts: “I was making a point about the jobs market, not the value of art history,” Obama wrote, in a handwritten note to an offended art historian. “As it so happens, art history was one of my favorite subjects in high school, and it has helped me take in a great deal of joy in my life that I might otherwise have missed.” One might conclude from this that the liberal arts give you enjoyment, and fields like business and communication yield employment.
That’s the conventional wisdom, but it’s probably wrong. In a recent survey of business leaders, nearly all of them said they valued clear thinking and communication skills in job applicants more than the particular undergraduate majors of job candidates; 80 percent agreed that “every college student should acquire broad knowledge in the liberal arts and sciences”; and three quarters said they would recommend liberal arts education as “the best way to prepare for success in today’s global economy.”4
Lagemann and Karpowitz make a similar point, noting that BPI’s liberal arts approach prepares graduates for a broader variety of vocations than an explicitly “vocational” curriculum would. They’re slightly ambivalent on this score, and for understandable reasons: by emphasizing advantages the liberal arts may have in securing jobs, we may risk diminishing the kind of intrinsic joy and deeper perception that President Obama experienced in his art history classes. But surely there is room for both: the liberal arts can prepare students to be economically successful workers and more aesthetically and intellectually aware human beings. And that’s also why we need to provide a liberal arts education to people across our diverse colleges and universities, as well as in elite institutions like Bard College.
At the same time, however, Americans also need to acknowledge that some tendencies in liberal education have closed minds rather than liberated them. The freewheeling, take-no-prisoners discussions in Bard’s prison program are in contrast to many campus classrooms, where rules of political decorum inhibit honest conversation. A professor tells Karpowitz that when she teaches students on the Bard campus they often respond to a controversial statement or opinion by announcing that they are “uncomfortable” with it. But her students in the prison program embrace rather than avoid potentially embarrassing topics, which give them intellectual respite from the dull routines of incarceration.
The comparison of the two kinds of discussion tells us a great deal, not just about the mind-deadening quality of prison life but also about the ways that elite campuses can dare constrain minds in the name of protecting them. Witness the growing language of trigger warnings and microaggressions and safe spaces, all anticipating that some students will be offended by a variety of historical references or literary texts and all reflecting the dubious proposition that young psyches need vigilant defense from injury. Many of the BPI students aren’t young, and they have caused or witnessed physical injuries that most of our campus students can only imagine. They’re not put off by controversy, and they never ask professors to shield them from it. One suspects that in many cases they get more out of college than their on-campus peers do, in part because the inmates aren’t afraid to give—or receive—offense. It is astonishing to think that prisoners could have, in effect, more freedom of speech than free citizens in many colleges. But in narrow matters of concern about offensive language, it might also be true.
Yet the biggest reason for the prisoners’ superior college education is also the simplest one: they work harder at it. American college students spend twelve hours per week studying, on average, and one third of them report studying less than five hours per week. This is nothing less than a scandal. In a typical semester, half of our college students don’t take a single class that demands twenty or more pages of writing, and one third of them don’t take a class requiring forty or more pages of reading.5 And even as American students do less schoolwork, their grades keep rising: about 43 percent of college grades in 2011 were A’s, up from 31 percent in 1988 and 15 percent in 1960.6
It is true that some students don’t have enough time to study intensively: many of them have to work long hours to support themselves, while others care for young children or aging relatives. But many other students are simply having a good time, on the public dime or their own, enjoying the company of their peers and putting academic learning to the side. Our colleges and universities collaborate in this travesty, providing easy paths to degrees and collecting big fees along the way. That is assumed to be a “sustainable model” by many involved. It is not.
For the past half-century, the operating principle of American higher education has been “access” of students to college: how to increase it, how to pay for it, and how to sustain it. From the GI Bill and the 1965 Higher Education Act through Obama’s call for free community colleges—and Bernie Sanders’s demand for free college—America has tried to provide more education to a greater portion of its people. This is a quintessentially democratic impulse, and it’s shared by Lagemann and Karpowitz; indeed, they imply that college-in-prison is part of the same long march to access.
But their books should also make us ask: Access to what? Why should more people go to college, at great expense to the commonweal and themselves, if they’re not learning very much? The problem isn’t college liberal arts, where students actually read and write more than in the so-called practical fields; it’s the low academic standards of college generally. Lagemann nods to this problem, noting that “defining ‘high quality’ has always been difficult in higher education.” But it’s not impossible, and it’s becoming imperative. Unlike governors Rick Scott and Pat McCrory, I think it’s perfectly legitimate, indeed necessary, for the state to subsidize students who major in philosophy or literature (or, for that matter, in business or communication). But only if they are seriously studying. And if they’re not, I wonder why they—or the institutions that let them skate by—are deserving of public assistance.
The Bard Prison Initiative gets almost no such assistance, even as its students get a world-class education. The same goes for most other college prison programs that have been organized around the country, which rely heavily on philanthropic donations. (State-run prison education efforts are mainly remedial and vocational, and—not surprisingly—their students don’t show nearly the kind of personal or job-related gains that full college-in-prison programs yield.) A student on campus who is not much interested in academic learning, and does not work hard at it, can receive a public subsidy, but a prisoner who devotes himself single-mindedly to his classes isn’t deemed worthy of any public help at all. “You’re used to teaching classes where the students would rather be sleeping off their hangovers,” a Maryland prison professor tells Lagemann, “[but] these guys are desperate to sit in the room and talk with you about big ideas.”
The big idea of America is democracy, as Alexis de Tocqueville observed nearly two centuries ago. But we often forget that he came here to study prisons, the dark hangover of our exuberant democratic experiment. “While society in the United States gives the example of the most extended liberty, the prisons of the same country offer the spectacle of the most complete despotism,” Tocqueville and his fellow traveler Gustave de Beaumont warned in 1833. Despite the noble efforts of prison educators—and the undeniable benefits of their work, for prisoners and for society writ large—we cannot expect the voting public to approve many expenditures that would substantially improve inmates’ lives. Private efforts, or some intervention by American colleges such as Bard, may be the only way to save prisoners from the living hell in which our democracy has entombed them.
MARCH 31, 2017
Review: Daniel Karpowitz’s “College in Prison”
by CHARLES R. LARSON
If you seek inspiration in these depressing times, if you need one iota of decency to keep you going, if you despair that Donald Trump’s lack of humility will permeate every aspect of our culture, search no further. Read Daniel Karpowitz’s stirring commitment to higher education in prisons in New York State. Forget all the naysayers who believe that prison should only be punishment (a guarantee for recidivism). Read Karpowitz’s illuminating account of Bard College’s decade long program to give offenders a second chance in their lives. Bard has long been regarded as an enlightened institution, willing to take risks with academic programs under the belief that much of higher education is closed off to people who need it the most (non-elites). And although Bard is, indeed, a select liberal arts college, stop there. Almost everything else demarcates it from most other schools in its same league.
Bard’s program began in 2001 and currently “Three hundred incarcerated men and women go to Bard College full-time in prison.” The courses have the same expectations of incarcerated students as those on the Bard campus, as well as the same standards. All students are on full scholarship. The recidivism rate is 2% for those who have finished their degrees, 4% for the ones who have taken some courses but not graduated. These figures are in contrast to the approximate 40% recidivism rate for the state as a whole. Karpowitz does not provide a figure for what the actual costs are to keep men and women in prison in New York or what it costs, specifically, to provide for the BPI (Bard Prison Initiative) but I have seen figures for other states (California, for example) indicating that the cost for incarcerating a prisoner is higher than typical educational expenses for a year in college. It’s difficult for me to understand how anyone can see college in prison not as a good investment.
Fifteen percent of the residents of New York are black, but fifty percent of its prisoners are. That telling disproportion is true, or worse, for many other areas in the country and has resulted in the erroneous conclusion that what minorities need are educational programs providing technical training. Karpowitz disagrees and collegeinprisoneloquently states that what all college students need are courses in the humanities, still the focus of most liberal arts colleges. That assumption has been attacked in recent years (“What good is a degree in English?) because of frequent parental insistence (parents are generally paying the bills) that their children avoid the humanities, that the humanities will prepare them for nothing. To this, Karpowitz observes, “The perceived crisis in the academy is not about the poverty or ossification of our traditions but about our institutional failure to take the risks needed to find students in unconventional places and engage them at critical moments in their lives.”
Nowhere is that more obvious than in Karpowitz’s specific accounts of Bard’s process of selecting students for the prison programs, of his teaching Crime and Punishment to his students, and in his narrative of four prisoners writing their graduation speeches. All of these show Karpowitz as a gifted educator. In the interviews for their admission to the college program, the potential students are repeatedly questioned to reveal things about themselves that demonstrate their uniqueness in coping with the monotony of prison life that will also provide the intellectual spark for their success in the program. One prisoner had difficulty explaining why he said he had so little time for the college program and a resistance to writing. Then under further probing, he revealed that at the end of every day he wrote an account of what happened for his nine-year-old daughter. When finished, he wrote a second account for his five-year-old daughter. Another student stated, “I found myself getting comfortable in here—in prison. And it terrified me. I looked around for the best way to make myself uncomfortable again—and I chose the college.” When I read that passage, I couldn’t help recalling, Herman Melville’s narrator of Moby Dick, explaining his decision to go to sea: complacency. Karpowitz provides his reasoning for teaching Dostoevsky’s novel to his prison students, stating that it “encourages serious inquiry into the foundations of existing moral conventions and the structural injustice of the existing criminal justice system.…” For more than a decade, I’ve been teaching in a book club at one of the Maryland public prisons, but I haven’t had the courage to include a book so close to the events that have resulted in many of my students’ incarceration as Crime and Punishment. Nor do I think that I could push my students as hard as Karpowitz has in getting them to write a perfect graduation speech. I feared as I read through the process that he was being unfair with them. Then, I saw the results and again witnessed Karpowitz’s brilliance.
One of the courses that he praises as part of the BPI is called “The Constitution and Slavery,” initiated by a colleague. The irony of the title is the Constitution’s failure to mention slavery, yet this provides the perfect opportunity to address moral issues of omission and provoke the analytical skills at the center of a liberal education. Reflecting on his own course with the same focus, Karpowitz notes, “As we had discovered in the conventional curriculum that year, it is a common travesty to teach the origins and significance of the U.S. Constitution without engaging deeply with the place of slavery in the founding of the country, its central place in both its economy, its fundamental law, and its contemporary ramifications. In a similar way, I have long noted how our familiar but quite important moral imperatives for individual responsibility and culpability all too often serve to conceal and displace the political imperative, equally important, to take shared responsibility for the foundational and deeply flawed institutions that constitute so much in our lives.”
For centuries, our culture has swept aside the same moral issues the Constitution avoided. Prisons are the evidence of this dereliction, mostly designed to perpetuate the status quo. A challenging liberal arts education can rectify these issues; how often that happens should be every serious educator’s concern. Fortunately, one unique school has discovered a way to institute moral thinking inside the walls of the state’s prisons. That same questioning should be occurring outside of prison walls.
Daniel Karpowitz: College in Prison
Rutgers Univ. Press, 208 pp., $24.95
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More articles by:CHARLES R. LARSON
Charles R. Larson is Emeritus Professor of Literature at American University, in Washington, D.C. Email = clarson@american.edu. Twitter @LarsonChuck.