Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
New York: Visitors to Fishkill Correctional Facility – an 1800-inmate prison two hours' drive north of New York City – are told to not wear green. That's the colour inmates wear. At a reception desk, you are searched, a coloured band is strapped to your wrist, you enter a cage, a gate slams behind you before another buzzes open into the general population.
Follow inmates down a path, past a sign that reads "No Spitting on the Walkway", to a squat brick building that houses a barber, a chapel, and – in the basement – a classroom where 14 prisoners are in an animated discussion on Darwinism with a teacher. It's here that Bard College, a 150-year-old prestigious university in upstate New York, runs free tertiary degree courses for incarcerated men and women.
The Bard Prison Initiative made global headlines in 2015 when a team of inmates beat Harvard in a debating contest. That win was a small victory against what Max Kenner – who founded BPI in 1999 while a student at Bard – describes as the destructive policies of mass incarceration in the United States and an event that opened a door to show a link between incarceration and education in America.
"We know for sure that, since the 1970s, the United States has begun locking up more people for longer periods of time for smaller infractions of the law," Mr Kenner told Fairfax Media during a visit to Fishkill.
"That happened concurrently with the divestment of the safety net – mental health, education, healthcare. There were substantial cuts in public funding to support the growth of the prison system – a rather extraordinary event."
About 2.3 million people are incarcerated across the United States – a number that has dramatically spiked since the 1980s. According to the Ford Foundation, which assists in funding BPI, 80 per cent of young African-American males today have a criminal record. Half a million people leave prison each year. Two-thirds of those released will eventually return.
A 2013 RAND report highlighted statistics that show college education reduced recidivism by 51 per cent yet after President Bill Clinton's administration – Democrats – shut down federal funding for prison education in 1994, there is little investment in education as a rehabilitation tool.
Mr Kenner says the price of sending a young person to jail is about the same as annual tuition fees at Harvard or Yale. In New York, it costs taxpayers about $US40,000-$US60,000 ($56,000-$85,000) a year to keep one person in jail.
In Fishkill's library, after suggesting Plato's Republic is his favourite book, Danny Contreras demonstrates the link between incarceration and education. From Brooklyn, Contreras, 34, dropped out of school in eighth grade. He was 19 years old when he was jailed for manslaughter. Now a third-year student at Bard, he is the first of his family in three generations to earn a college degree.
"Not only does this program afford people the opportunity to start an education, it brings complete opportunity," Contreras said. "Imagine if people on the street had this opportunity."
Glenn Rodriguez, 41, dropped out of his Bronx high school in 10th grade. He was jailed in 1990, aged 16, convicted for murder.
"I wouldn't say the school failed me," he said. "I take responsibility for the crime but my problem was peer pressure. I didn't understand the value of education. I would rather be with the cool guys. Now, I see. If education can penetrate prisons it can penetrate anything."
Lawrence Dotson, 42, is in his 25th year in jail after entering prison aged 17 – also convicted of murder. In 1995, he graduated from high school – in prison – and in 2007 won a prized place at Bard.
"I now have the tools," said Dotson, who may be released in the next few years. "If you put a person out there [after release] and they don't have the tools they will fail. This program means it's not just you against the world."
Mr Kenner suggested a critical element of mass incarceration is who ends up in prison.
"It is overwhelmingly young men of colour who come from specific neighbourhoods," he said. "In Brooklyn, there are individual blocks where the state of New York spends over $1 million a year incarcerating people from that particular block. You can imagine different ways that $1 million can be spent."
Fishkill superintendent Bob Cunningham told Fairfax Media he supported college programs in prison yet there is outside criticism of a concept where jailed felons receive benefits not available to those outside. Mr Kenner counters that more damage is done by not investing in inmates.
"People who take up that argument often assume we are flip about problems of violence in American life," he said. "That is precisely wrong. At some point we might be more effective responding to violence with something other than violence."
Contreras is also looking at possible release in the next few years: "Everyone has their own fears and everyone has their own concerns but we have no choice but to succeed [on release]. To fail would be horrible."
