In his opening address at the College in Prison Symposium held last Monday, Assistant Professor of Political Studies at Bard College, Daniel Karpowitz, described a course he teaches on Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” in which students study the relationship between law and literature. The catch? His classroom and his students are behind bars.
“The students are never called upon to reflect on themselves, but are called upon to do exactly the same thing as students at Bard College,” Karpowitz said. “The core principle of the program is to maintain the same academic rigor, scope, ambitions and spirit of what we do on the conventional campus.”
Karpowitz, who is the Director of Policy and Academics for the Bard Prison Initiative, and Max Kenner, its founder, have been directing two satellite colleges inside two long-term maximum-security prisons and two transitional medium-security prisons for the past 11 years. Approximately 160 students are currently enrolled in the competitive program, which culminates in a Bard degree.
25 years ago, only 200,000 Americans were incarcerated; today, that number has risen to over 2 million. In fact, one out of every 100 Americans is now in prison. In the state of Connecticut, public investment in the prison system is greater than its investment in education.
These types of statistics have motivated students like Russell Perkins ’09, who for the past two years has been a part of the Prisoner Solidarity Project, a group of students who hope to bring a College in Prison program to Wesleyan modeled after Bard, Boston University and others.
“There is a conventional sense in which prisoners are the last people qualified to go to Wesleyan, but in that they largely represent a population that the educational system has profoundly failed, they are precisely the kind of students a place like Wesleyan should try to serve,” Perkins said. “Part of why I’m doing this is that I feel very strongly about Wesleyan as an institution. By incorporating this program, what we’re doing is actually committing to our belief that an education is a truly powerful thing.”
The Prisoner Solidarity Project is an offshoot of WesPREP, the Wesleyan Prison Research and Education Program, a prison advocacy group that leads workshops in prison and promotes activism on campus. Students and faculty involved in the project are proposing a two-year College-in-Prison pilot program at Cheshire Correctional Institution in Connecticut, located about half an hour away from campus.
Molly Birnbaum ’09 joined WesPREP her freshman year and has been deeply committed to the Prisoner Solidarity Project since then, working with faculty and staff to develop the program. She is also helping to write a grant for funding and organizing the symposium with other students.
“Coming from my neighborhood, prison and policing were all around me, but it was the type of thing that was just a given in the makeup of urban life,” Birnbaum said. “I wanted to address those issues of systemic racism and class oppression that plagued the place where I grew up.”
According to Perkins, the Wesleyan Center for Prison Education proposal pilot program would be highly competitive, with only 15 inmates being admitted, and taught exclusively by faculty. Admitted students would enroll in two courses per semester for “non degree seeking” academic credit, at least initially.
“Academic credit is something Wesleyan takes very seriously, and it comes along with extremely rigorous expectations,” Perkins said. “We’re asking Wesleyan to make a significant investment in the sense that Wesleyan academic credit and faculty are two of our most precious resources.”
The Center is also proposing “Critical Pedagogy,” a service-learning seminar where conventional Wesleyan students will learn about incarceration as well as tutor prisoners not accepted into the credit-bearing program.
Jason Kavett ’09 started volunteering in prison his first year at Wesleyan. Since then Kavett and about 30 other students have led workshops at Cheshire and also at York Women’s Prison on subjects like anthropology, poetry and non-fiction writing.
“Those [professors] who participate will find not just excited and talented students, but also a fresh outlet to share what they do best,” he said. “I think this will happen because, while being innovative, it is really only a reflection of the kind of engagement that defines Wesleyan as an institution. The program is actually quite conventional for us.”
Birnbaum said the level of commitment of incarcerated students often surpasses that of the average Wesleyan student.
“I’ve heard stories about professors who become reinvigorated as teachers through their experience working with incarcerated students,” she said. “Professors would not be diverting attention away from the Wesleyan classroom, but rather enriching their tenure with different experiences and new ways of approaching the process of learning.”
Karpowitz and Kenner were joined by two other panelists on Monday night in the Memorial Chapel: Dr. Robert Cadigan, who directs a Prison Education Program at Boston University, and Theater Professor Ronald Jenkins, whose course “Activism and Outreach through Theater” allows Wesleyan students to perform alongside prisoners in the Connecticut Juvenile Training School and York Women’s Prison.
While all five panelists advocated the program’s implementation at Wesleyan, there were differences of opinion as to how to carry out the program, even amongst colleagues. Questions about the value—or lack thereof—of interactions between traditional students and students in prison, as well as concerns about censorship and rules were common, as well as what one panelist called “anti-training”: that is, whether or not to allow faculty to discuss their students’ own “crime and punishment.”
“The panel gave the community a chance to see a large spectrum of approaches and even politics that advocates for this program have,” Kavett said. “We saw that even though you could say there is an obvious kind of progressive politics in the background, there is no dogmatic set of beliefs one has to have to understand why the program is so compelling.”