Round Table Debrief

     Yesterday students from Vassar's Greenhaven, Otisville, and Taconic prison programs gathered in New England to discuss their respective experiences and to compare and contrast them. We discovered early on that the natures of our experiences were necessarily different based on several objective facts that separated the prisons: Greenhaven is a Maximum A Security facility, Otisville is a Medium B facility, and Taconic is also a Medium-security facility. The fact that Greenhaven is a Maximum Security facility means that a majority of the men incarcerated there--around 60%--are serving life sentences. Vassar students are also not allowed to sit alongside the men but must face them at a distance of several feet. Additionally, the looser security at Otisville allows students in programs there to engage in creative activities involving role-playing, skits, presentations, and so on. The incarcerated men are allowed to have a hand in shaping these programs. The Greenhaven experience is much more rigid. The Department of Corrections mandates that Vassar must supply a syllabus and the experience is basically limited to asking the men questions. There are advantages and disadvantages to these differences. For one thing, Greenhaven does not impose a creative structure upon conversations that might be deemed controversial. Conversations at Otisville, though they might focus on topics that could be called controversial, tend to engage with them through activities and games, while conversations with Green Haven do not have this luxury and so are more direct.  


      Many of the students also stated that they sometimes felt unprepared to talk about why they were in the program in the first place. One of the students stated that one of the incarcerated women asked them one day why they chose to participate in this program, and none of the students knew what to say. This anecdote led to a more general conversation about why any of the students had enrolled in the program. Several of the students stated that they felt ill-equipped to prepare the men for life outside of prison, which seemed to be their role. Another student stated, however, that the men and women in these programs are not naive. They know that we are just college students and that it would be ludicrous to ask us to teach them life lessons when they have had so much more life experience than we do. The point of these conversations, this student said, and the only way that they might help the incarcerated men and women prepare for life outside prison, is to have experience interacting with people and sharing ideas--not to impart our knowledge and wisdom upon them. From this perspective, agonizing about the fact that we are ill-equipped to teach them things is paternalistic because this is not the point of the programs in the first place.

     Professor Mamiya explained some of his intentions in starting the program, and stated that he viewed the programs as an opportunity to teach Vassar students first hand about institutional racism, and that this was "The one time Vassar students get to talk to poor black and Latino men." For this reason, he views the program and the philosophy behind its foundation as anti-racist education. This perspective on the program challenges Vassar students to connect their experiences in prison to their lives at school, and to challenge their preconceived notions about criminals, the criminal justice system, crime, and so on. But preconceived notions about privilege and race should also be challenged. One student commented on the intensity of being in a room in which the people who looked like him were not the Vassar students but the ones wearing green, the incarcerated men, who came from places whose streets he could name and from neighborhoods he had visited. Getting involved in these programs should not only make us question a criminal justice system that targets people of color, but also question a system of higher education which systematically excludes them. Why do we have to drive an hour and a half in a van to talk to these men and women? Why aren't they in the classroom next to us? A failure to take these questions seriously might account for the next topic we discussed, which was the question of why more people of color, particularly women of color, do not become involved in the prison program.