Dear Wesleyan Faculty and Fellow Students,

In the midst of all the excitement over the near approval of a Wesleyan College in Prison pilot program for the coming academic year, I wish to take a step back to consider the possible implications of the proposed program, and to re-imagine the best way to move forward at this moment in time. [1] As a citizen and activist passionate about the urgent need to actively oppose the U.S. prison industrial complex, as a current workshop facilitator at York Prison in Niantic, CT, and as a former member of the student group working to establish the WCPE (the Wesleyan Center for Prison Education), I have become increasingly disillusioned with the Wesleyan College in Prison program.  Before it is too late, I urge us as a community to give this proposal the critical attention it deserves.

The goal of the WCPE is undoubtedly a worthy one: to offer college-level courses taught by Wesleyan professors to incarcerated individuals for credit.  The program is meant to take place at the Cheshire Correctional Institution in Cheshire, CT, the largest male high-security prison in the state.  As the mission statement of the WCPE proposal reads, the aim is to offer courses to “those who are systematically denied access to educational opportunities,” because “we believe access to a college education should be a right for all.”

Yet in making this claim, the proposal fails by its own logic.  Cheshire Prison incarcerates approximately 1,361 people.  This two-year pilot program will admit fifteen students in the first year and thirty in the second year, .01 percent and .02 percent respectively of the total prison population.  In order to determine who gets to participate, the project states, “we propose a rigorous application process that will evaluate reading comprehension, writing ability and critical thinking skills of potential applicants.”  Thus rather than enacting the belief that college education should be a right for all, this program explicitly outlines how individuals will be judged in order to determine whether or not they are worthy of this education, by a process that will necessarily privilege those coming from more advantaged backgrounds.

Rather than allowing inmates to elect the option of attending classes, this framework perpetuates a system of denied access for a population that has already been “systematically denied access to educational opportunities,” in a space that offers few alternatives.  And in admitting only .01 percent of the population, this program will re-institute a social hierarchy throughout the entire prison structured on exclusive access to privileged forms of knowledge.

This is not the only way a college in prison program can exist.  This is simply the model that has been dictated to the WCPE by a grant offered from the Bard College in Prison program.  In some Connecticut prisons, community colleges offer open access courses for degree-granting credit (the WCPE offers only “non-degree seeking” transferable credit, meaning that participants will not be granted Wesleyan degrees).  It is possible that Wesleyan could become an ally to these programs.  Another starting point could be to set up an open access lecture series at Cheshire by Wesleyan professors.

Some argue that as a pilot, this program will grow to admit more people.  Between year one and year two of the pilot, the program will expand from excluding 99.99 percent of Cheshire’s population, to excluding 99.98 percent.  Given these statistics, how much expansion can we truly hope for down the road?  Some argue that the intense competition for admission is necessary to uphold the belief that the “same standards of academic rigor that adhere at Wesleyan can be upheld in a class taught to prison inmates.” [2] Such an argument remains entirely within the paradigm that accepts prison as a space where rehabilitation is possible – yet only allows the possibility of redemption to a select few, within the terms of the intellectual order that has created the category of their exclusion.

The significance of this decision extends far beyond the relationship between Cheshire and Wesleyan.  The hope of the WCPE (as it has been explained to me) is to make this a satellite program to be replicated in colleges and prisons across the country.  I see this potential national expansion as re-creating the paternalistic logic of development that offers band-aid solutions in moments of crisis, effectively diverting attention and energy from meaningful radical organizing for social change.

There are many, many more things to be said here that this space will not allow.  But I want to end by saying that I deeply respect the incredible amount of work that my fellow students have put into making this program happen.  I know that the hardest time to re-evaluate is when things feel so close to completion.  Yet personally, I find no sense of completion in the institutionalization of a program that lacks a broader vision and strategy for how to confront and transform the present crisis of the U.S. prison system.  It is a dangerous game to theorize about the horror of the prison industrial complex, and then separate this from our own involvement in its recreation – especially at a moment when we have the opportunity to begin something new.

I know that there are many people on this campus who care deeply about these issues, and for this reason I urge us to talk to each other about the significance of this proposal.  It is happening now, and it is in our name.

Sincerely,

Sylvia Ryerson

[1] The proposal has passed the Educational Policy Committee (EPC), but must still be passed by a faculty vote.

[2] From the WCPE proposal.