To provide resources for higher education to prison inmates, students of WesPREP collaborated with a prison education program in New York to submit a proposal to the foundation of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Inc. this semester. They requested a $500,000 dollar grant that, if chosen, will institute a college-accredited learning program in a Connecticut prison.
Students are in the process of developing a separate nonprofit organization, Principle Eleven, to fund the college-in-prison program if their proposal is chosen.
Principle Eleven is expected to receive incorporation status later this month, so it can become a partner of the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI), a college-in prison program affiliated with Bard College that has been offering college degrees in prison for approximately five years.
“Principle Eleven has applied to the Stewart foundation for money to start a college program at York Prison [and] to [fund] lobbying efforts, and to bring public and private money back into college in prison,” said Kate Piper ’05, a member of WesPREP.
Principle Eleven hopes to begin a bachelor’s accredited college-in-prison program at York Correctional Institution, the only women’s prison in the state of Connecticut, as early as this fall.
According to Piper, WesPREP is optimistic about the foundation’s pending decision on their request. The proposal has already made it past the preliminary review. A final version was submitted last Friday that will go on to be evaluated by the board members of Omnimedia and Stewart herself.
There has not been a college-in-prison program at York College since 2000, when lack of funding forced the prison to end their program with a Connecticut community college, despite a demand at the time that surpassed the program’s enrollment size.
According to BPI’s official website, the organization currently has 60 prisoners enrolled in fulltime academic study.
“We are looking forward to Principle Eleven because it will connect people in a way that will start making things happen,” said Sidney Russell ’07, a member of WesPREP.
Brussell and Piper both emphasized the fact that WesPREP is not incorporating itself into this process, as the Wesleyan group will remain a student organization.
Principle Eleven is, however, looking to situate its office in Middletown, so that there can be collaborative efforts between Principle Eleven and WesPREP.
“Hopefully there will be some [Wesleyan] professors to teach the [Bard accredited] courses for Principle Eleven if it this grant comes in,” Russell said.
Piper said that she will act as Interim Program Coordinator of Principle Eleven next year until a permanent, full time, staff member is hired.
“BPI will be the umbrella organization for Principle Eleven,” Piper said.“Bard College will grant the degrees Principle Eleven will grant.”
The new organization gets its name from an event that ensued from an organized rebellion that took place in New York’s Attica Correctional Facility in 1971. With forty hostages, 1,300 prisoners took over the prison for five days and tried to negotiate a list of 15 practical proposals. The morning of the fifth day, the federal troops seized control of the prison killing 33 prisoners and 10 hostages.
Generally, these demands ranged from religious tolerance to adequate medical treatment to standard minimum wage laws in state-run prison facilities.
The eleventh proposal of this list was the demand to modernize the inmate education system. As a result of the rebellion, the government began to allocate Pell Grant funding to create college-in-prison programs.
“The government came in and killed many, many people—guards and prisoners alike—yet it was the men who were organizing and demanding to be respected as human beings that were demonized by the state and the media,” Piper said. “It is extremely important that prison education programs came from the prisoners themselves. It came from their own action.”
The number of college-in-prison programs that were created after the Attica rebellion has drastically decreased in the last 10 years.
According to Piper, Congress withdrew federal funding in 1995 for college-in-prison programs, putting an end to virtually all programs in prisons across the country.
“[Currently] there is a small federal grant that sponsors a few courses at York only for incarcerated youth, and there are so many guidelines that so few of the prisoners are even eligible to take the courses,” she said.
For more information about Principle Eleven, contact Haley at hamoss@wesleyan.edu.
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