I just watched one of the most moving documentaries of my life.
College Behind Bars, presented by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick (The Vietnam War), explores the moral dilemma of providing college education to prisoners.
By the end of the fourth and final episode, when an inmate of Korean descent named Sebastian, received his final mark in his Liberal Arts degree, tears streamed unencumbered from my eyes.
The Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) is a program of Bard College (NY) that provides inmates the opportunity to enroll in a liberal arts program and earn a college degree. It currently enrolls 350 inmates throughout NY state (of the 57,000 total inmates), of whom many are serving multi-decade sentences for serious crimes such as murder. [1]
Students must apply for the program, enroll full-time, are held to the same high standards and graduate with Bard College degrees. Some of the authors that the students are exposed to include Whitman, Plato, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Herman Melville, Shakespeare, Homer, Aristotle, Arendt, Thoreau, and many, many more.
Within a short period of time these students become more knowledgeable than the corrections officers responsible for their supervision. The tension is palpable throughout the documentary, as almost none of the corrections officer were willing to be interviewed and required that their faces be blurred out.
A mother of one of the inmates held her daughter in contempt because even though she, as her mother, did not commit a crime, she could not afford a college education. In her feud with her daughter, she exclaimed that she believes this educational program incentivizes people to commit a crime, just so that they can enroll in this program and get a college degree.
Many politicians agree. Former president Bill Clinton was among the first to eliminate funds for college education for prisoners with his controversial 1994 Crime Bill [2], notably penned by Joe Biden [3}.
Contrary to Clinton, in 2014 Andrew Cuomo, Governor of New York proposed an initiative to both educate New York’s prison population and save taxpayers money. He received so little support that the initiative was soon abandoned. [4]
Every year throughout the US more than 600,000 prisoners are released. Within 3 years, more than 50% of them will be back in prison. [5] This is called the recidivism rate.
In comparison, the recidivism rate for BPI students is 4%.
Governor Cuomo was correct. Amongst many other sociological benefits, every dollar spent on higher education in prison saves tax payers five dollars. [6]
The cost of incarceration per prisoner in New York is about the same as attending Harvard, that is $69,355 [4] and $78,200 [5] respectively. Although, to Harvard’s dismay, in 2015 the incarcerated BPI students prevailed over Harvard’s acclaimed debate team, and again in 2019 against Cambridge’s top debaters. [7]
Prior to COVID-19 unemployment in the USA stood at 3.6% [8]. Unemployment numbers for formerly incarcerated individuals were 27 percent. [9] With a criminal record and without an education, how would a prisoner get a decent job in order to stay away from crime?
With so many socioeconomic benefits to motivate the case for college education programs in prisons, why would government remain so ill-disposed to these initiatives?
I suspect that the (short-sighted) argument would be the same as that of the mother in the documentary—that college is a privilege that prisoners should not have access to and that programs like these incentivize people to commit a crime in order to get into prison just to apply for the BPI program.
It stands to reason whether a person would be willing to take the risk of incarceration, sacrifice years or even decades of his or her life, suffer grave emotional malnutrition and dehumanization in the context of prison life and upon release still carry the stigma of a criminal record wherever they go.
The Bard professors also testify that the prison inmates are by far their best students, most likely because they are desperate to improve their sense of self-worth, understand that this opportunity could be taken away from them at any time, and that their education is not a right, but indeed a privilege—a privilege that should be earned, not demanded.
—
To watch this documentary for the soul purpose of seeing Sebastian’s response in Episode 4, would make it more than worth your time. College Behind Bars is now available on Netflix.
With love,
Since BPI’s founding, some 600 Bard college degrees have been earned by BPI students. It is almost entirely privately funded. If you'd like to support the program, follow this link to their website.
About the Image: The Prison of the Mind, by Pierre F. Lombard - Cape Town 2019. Featuring Marc Buckner (The Bachelor, SA 2020)