Washington University Goes to Prison
Good news: after you graduate, odds are you won’t be going to prison. For all the self-deprecating jokes you’ll make about getting a liberal arts education, it’s worth noting that statistically speaking, it’s the most powerful thing standing between you and a life behind bars.
In fact, go further back and thank your high school teachers, because a majority of incarcerated people in the United States lack a high school diploma or its equivalent. The first time in prison usually isn’t a person’s last. U.S. recidivism rates, or the percentage of those incarcerated more than once, are 52%. Unless, of course, incarcerated people have access to higher education in prison, which has proven definitively to slash recidivism rates and transform the incarcerated into productive citizens with bright futures.
A group of Washington University faculty is in the process of creating such a program for the Missouri prison system.
The purpose of prison, we’re told, has two major components: punishment and rehabilitation. Unfortunately, in the United States punishment takes nearly all the resources and, perversely, does nothing to prevent individuals from returning to illegal activities after their release. When prisons release their inmates they give them the clothes they entered wearing and a bus ticket- what Daniel Karpowitz, Director of Policy and Academics for the Bard Prison Initiative, calls, “a bus ticket to recidivism.”
Felons find it nearly impossible to find steady work after their release, often leading them to see a return to illegal activity as their only way to support themselves. They have served their time on the inside, but society has set the rules so that they continue to pay for their deeds even after their release. Communities with high crime levels find themselves stuck in this vicious cycle of the criminal justice system.
In 1995, legislation signed by President Bill Clinton stripped incarcerated people of Pell Grant eligibility, making federally funded college-in-prison programs illegal. What “tough on crime” legislators failed to realize was how tough on crime those education programs truly were. The Clinton crime bill attacked the people, not the causes of crime itself. Congress apparently did not know that among inmates who have significant educational opportunities in prison recidivism rates fall to 22% from over half.
The Bard Prison Initiative, founded by Bard College undergraduate Max Kenner (who now serves as its executive director) in 1999, teaches a full course-load to incarcerated men and women in prisons in Upstate New York and since 2005 has granted full college degrees to its students. The courses are the exact same as those taught at Bard, one of the nation’s most prestigious liberal arts colleges. The vast majority of incarcerated people initially fail to gain admission to the program. Instead of discouraging them, the competitive nature of the program has actually proven to motivate many to complete GEDs and reapply, again and again. As of 2011 Bard had granted 157 degrees to students enrolled in BPI. Only 2% of the incarcerated people who have been enrolled in the program have returned to prison. That’s tough on crime.
For the last several months a group of Washington University faculty have been working to create the Washington University Prison Education Program and I am writing this article as the group’s undergraduate representative. The students I have talked to about the program have greeted it enthusiastically and have curiously asked about how it will work.
In its initial stages, faculty affiliated with the Prison Education Program will teach a handful of non-credit granting courses in a Missouri prison. Over time the faculty hope to expand the variety of courses offered and eventually grant degrees to incarcerated students. Traditional undergraduates will have plenty of opportunities to be involved, with possible opportunities ranging from serving as tutors to taking classes side-by-side with incarcerated students in a model known as “Inside-Out,” variations of which are used at Indiana University, Harvard, and Wesleyan.
The price tag for the program is relatively minimal; its main costs are books and school supplies for the incarcerated and transportation stipends for professors. The benefits, however, are tremendous.
As an anchor institution in the St. Louis area, Washington University would be giving back to the community in a way that only a top university can: by giving the gift of education. Traditional students will have the chance to affect real social change in an academic context, eschewing the ivory tower for hands-on learning and activism. Washington University proclaims in its mission statement “to be an institution that excels by its accomplishments in our home community, St. Louis, as well as in the nation and the world.” By supporting the Prison Education Program, the university would prove its devotion to excelling through the successes of the broader community.