Liberal Arts in Unexpected Places

Arguably there is no more urgent human rights issue in the United States than our current policy of mass incarceration. We lead the world in the percentage of our population that is imprisoned, and the system is rife with class, race, and gender discrimination. Dramatic increases in incarceration in the U.S. in the past twenty-five years have occurred with remarkably little public discussion or debate.

In light of this, it is crucial to think about role of the academy and educators regarding this issue. The history of higher education in prisons has been uneven, but virtually all of the programs that had rapidly increased in 1960’s and 70’s were discontinued in the 1990’s as more punitive attitudes toward crime and criminals continued to develop. In 1994, both the state and federal government prohibited the use of need-based TAP and Pell grants for anyone in prison, with devastating effect. Most higher education programming in prison ended abruptly, and comparatively few programs exist today.

Empirical research demonstrates that the education of people in prison, especially post-secondary education, is highly cost-effective in terms of reducing future crime and restoring offenders as contributing members of the community. Education has a powerful impact not only on those receiving this education, but also on other inmates who are inspired and helped by this core group. It also positively impacts their children, who are more likely to stay in school themselves and less likely to enter the criminal justice system than other children of incarcerated parents.

A wide and favorable literature also documents the experiences of those who teach in these programs. Repeatedly we hear that they have rarely encountered students so eager to learn, so responsive to being challenged intellectually.

Our own experience supports this positive assessment. For the past 5 years we have taught at Taconic Correctional Facility, a medium security prison for women in Bedford Hills, under the auspices of a program administered by Hudson Link for Higher Education in Prison. Our classes have counted as part of our teaching load and have included 10 Vassar students and 10 – 12 women from Taconic, all receiving Vassar College credit. One of our courses focused on social problems, another on the family in the contemporary U.S.

Both the students from Vassar and those from Taconic confronted — and quickly overcame — stereotypes they had of one another, along with fears of being judged unfavorably. The Taconic women worried that the Vassar students would regard them as bad persons and social pariahs, and the Vassar students worried that the Taconic women would think they were over-privileged, naïve and stuck-up youth. Although both groups began with a keen awareness of the differences that divided them, they quickly began to see their commonalities as they entered into discussions of the material. Significantly, however, they ultimately returned to a recognition of their differences, not by way of stereotyping but with a genuine understanding of the advantages and disadvantages that come with race, class, and gender. They learned about the social impact of these differences in a truly profound way — by learning from one another. They also witnessed the power of education as both groups created in the classroom an open and egalitarian environment essential to education and antithetical to the bureaucratic, rules-based culture of prisons, and stereotypes of prisoners.

Challenges certainly accompany this type of teaching, not the least of which is gaining access to the prison in the first place, and recognizing that your presence is always conditional on the good graces of the institution. Weekly entrance procedures — always changing — were a valuable lesson for outside students, as were the many rules we encountered (no cell phones, no touching, no flip flops, no slogans on tee shirts, etc). The inside students have no access to computers nor do they have an adequate library. Moreover we are unable to advise or communicate with them during the week — so no last minute changes in the reading! We also experienced the challenge of teaching sociological and political perspectives in a context where women are constantly encouraged to blame themselves (the language of “taking responsibility”), and some see themselves exclusively as victims. Our courses offer a way of contextualizing one’s life, and coming to understand the balance between social constraints and individual choices, but this is a challenging perspective to develop in one semester.

We learned more about the range of abilities that need to be recognized and cultivated in any student, and how narrow the emphasis can be in traditional academic settings when we prioritize certain skills (such as writing) as opposed to other significant skills (including verbal abilities and intellectual honesty in the classroom).

We also learned in a more profound way the significance of difference in the classroom in terms of age, citizenship, race, class, politics, and again how narrow these differences can be in academia. This narrowness silences many groups and diminishes the educational experiences of all involved.

We were reminded of the insistence of many scholars in both of our disciplines of the need to reach out to men and women beyond the university, and that teaching should be in service to social justice. The squandering of human potential and abilities within prisons is a human, social and political tragedy. These programs are no substitute for the vast changes needed to reform or abolish prisons, but they are a way of challenging those institutions to take seriously their mission to rehabilitate and to foster the reintegration of inmates into US society.

We also realized how courageous it is for superintendents and commissioners to embrace these programs – especially ones allowing outside students to enter prisons on a weekly basis. As the Commissioner of the Department of Corrections in New York, Brian Fischer, pointed out: there is plenty of opposition to such programs from people working inside the prison as well as those in the general public who see college courses as giving undeserved benefits to criminals. In addition, Fischer knows that most academics that gain entrance to prisons are critical of these institutions and many of their procedures. Corrections personnel who embrace higher education programs therefore take real political risks. Building a base of support for these programs requires lots of communication, coalition building, and compromise.

We live in a time when everyone seems to be questioning the value of a liberal arts education and looking for ways to quantify successful learning and failure to learn.
The positive effect of college courses in prisons on recidivism rates is quantifiable and irrefutable. Moreover, through these courses outside students learn more about mass incarceration and social issues than books alone can convey. But the value of the shared educational experience for both “inside” and “outside” students goes far beyond these measureable benefits. This type of education entails transformation, enabling participants to reach beyond the social boundaries that imprison all of us. Perhaps such things were never meant to be quantified, but they speak directly to essential values of education. A liberal education is meant to expand our horizons and affect us deeply. Such an education requires a space — we would even say a sacred space — where people can connect across differences as a community of learners, and where everyone is invited to participate.

And it’s this type of education (substantive, deeply engaging, and transformative) that you’ll find in a most improbable place — within our American prison system.