Loss of Funding

In an article entitled “The Pendulum Swings” for a publication put out by the National Center for the Study of Adult Learning and Literacy, Dominique Chlup states that, “Many of the country’s corrections college education programs were eliminated with the passage of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1993 and the Higher Education Reauthorization Act of 1994. The acts, which repealed Pell Grant funding for prisoners enrolled in college programs, significantly reduced the number of postsecondary programs available for inmates. Michele Welsh, who surveyed corrections directors from the 50 states and the District of Columbia about the effects of the elimination of Pell Grants, found that they perceived ‘a significant decrease in access, quality, and success due to the elimination of Pell Grant eligibility for inmates.’ She concluded that ‘the loss of Pell Grant eligibility has reduced correctional education.’”[1]

---

[1] Chlup, Dominique L. "NCSALL: The Pendulum Swings." NCSALL: NCSALL Home. Sept. 2005. Web. 08 Dec. 2010. <http://www.ncsall.net/index.php?id=826>.

The Vassar/Green Haven Reunion

Every year formerly incarcerated men and women who have participated in Vassar College programs gather at Vassar with the students who have participated in these programs for a single day of food, conversations, film screenings, and conviviality. A diverse collection of formerly incarcerated men and women from various facilities, prison activists, community leaders, professors, students, and so on all gather in the same location for the purpose of remembering their experiences together and discussing the criminal justice system in America. During this experience attendees have the opportunity to meet people who have devoted much of their lives to helping those whom American society turns its back on. Many of the men and women travel long distances and are eager to see each other after long periods of separation. There are discussion-based forums and lectures about specific topics relating to the criminal justice system and social issues. Panels are held in which formerly incarcerated men and women have the opportunity to discuss their experiences and compare and contrast them. Come to the Ely Aula Auditorium for the Vassar/Green Haven Reunion on Saturday, April 2nd.

Alternatives to Incarceration

With the recognition that the United States has the highest
incarceration rate and largest prison population in any country, many
groups have begun proposing alternatives to incarceration (or A.T.I.)
programs. These programs seek to shift the focus of the criminal justice
system away from punishment and towards rehabilitation. These programs
strive to give courts more options when sentencing people, and strive
to maintain community ties that would otherwise be broken by
incarcerating men and women far from their homes. Here are a few
examples:

The Fortune Society -- has programs designed to assist individuals break
the cycle of criminal activity by addressing the physical, emotional,
psychological, and psycho-social needs specific to those involved in the
criminal justice system; enable successful participants to live a
constructive, independent, and self-sufficient life by developing
educational & vocational skills consistent with legitimate, gainful
employment; culturally-appropriate programming and residential drug
treatment as an alternative to incarceration. ("Building People, Not
Prisons")

The Osborne Association -- offers highly motivated participants an
intensive program while they are still incarcerated, including cognitive
skills, job readiness, and fatherhood programming and vocational
training, including computer literacy and culinary arts training leading
to a NYC Food Handler’s Certificate and assistance in gaining employment
in the food services sector.

Community Corrections -- also called "halfway houses," "residential
reentry centers," probation keeps the offender in the community but puts
limits and obligations on his freedom. Probation can come with many
conditions attached, including meeting regularly with a probation
officer, staying under house arrest during certain parts of the day,
remaining drug-free, working, doing community service, and participating
in substance abuse or mental health treatment.

Prison Facts and Statistics

It costs $35,000 a year to keep one person incarcerated in a New York State Prison.

According to Department of Justice 2009 data, Black males were incarcerated at a rate more than 6 times higher than white males.

In the United States, black men have a 1 in 3 chance of spending time in a prison or jail.

The United States rate of incarceration is the highest in the world.

The number of people incarcerated in state and federal prisons has increased nearly seven-fold from 1970 to 2007.

One in ten black men aged 25-29 was in prison or jail in 2007 as were 1 in 28 Hispanic men and 1 in 59 white men in the same age group.[1]

In New York State, one of every seven people who are incarcerated is diagnosed as HIV positive.

In 1979, a small group of men behind prison walls, birthed the Seven Neighborhood Study, a project that shone a spotlight on a secret, yet systematic, exodus-like trend occurring in seven NYC neighborhoods to upstate New York prisons to feed its prison population appetite.  Their results show that 75% of the New York State prison population comes from only seven neighborhoods in New York City, a trend that continues today.

Prison based education is the single most effective tool for reducing recidivism.

People who leave prison with a high school diploma have a recidivism rate of 30%, for those who have received their Masters, that number is brought down to almost 0.

Of the $5.3 billion awarded in Pell grants in 1993, about $34 million were awarded to incarcerated men and women. This represents less than 1/10 of one percent (.1%) of the total grant awards.[2]

Despite the position of policy experts within the federal and state government, including both educators and correctional officials, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act effectively dismantled correctional higher education.

---

[1] "Facts About Prisons and Prisoners." The Sentencing Project. Web. <www.sentencingproject.org>.

[2]  Karpowitz, Daniel, and Max Kenner. Education as Crime Prevention: The Case for Reinstating Pell Grant Eligibility for the Incarcerated. Bard Prison Initiative. Web. <http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:wP7Q0CxfKnEJ:www.bard.edu/bpi/pdfs/crime_report.pdf+PEL+grants,+prison&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESjCACtJkWIXumLTiH7bEYMNk3wfADxoke74mHF-KguDMDD37XNobwZaqwAmKXBcRjRcVqEIjjAq984DK4QPQnDgyo6FUA-7b290g6j15FNEwIpPSd5snp3MVMKqjyhKD040ZIj2&sig=AHIEtbQx1GjkHXfBgpXmN4pwWVxzzni96w>.

Thank You

Trying to figure out what to write about for today, I kept racking my brain. I didn’t want to stand up here and give a few minutes of nonesense, and then I started feeling like I didn’t really have anything new to contribute to this space. As I continued to think and rethink about what I could offer to a community that has come to mean a lot to me, I remembered part of why I chose to continue to be a part of Bridging The Gap. On the very first day when we were giving our introductions, I stood up here in front of you all, initially with a shaky voice and a level of discomfort that I couldn’t separate myself from. While others were mentioning what they were majoring in, where they were from and so on, I felt like I had been prematurely forced to divulge deeper information about myself than I was ready to. Just before giving my short intro, someone had referred to me as an African-American. That typical assumption, was not new to me by any means, the discomfort came from having to explain myself once again to people I barely knew, including not only you guys from Otisville but my classmates from Vassar. There’s a really good chance that none of you even remember that moment, but for me it always seems to stick out. The point that I’m trying to make from retelling this story is that throughout my time at Vassar I have spent a large of amount of time attempting to articulate my identity, who I am, what I represent and how to present my understanding of that existence to the communities I am a part of.

Being a member of this community at BTG has allowed me to get closer to finding the answers to these questions. Issues of identity are something that drives my curiosities both as a student and a person living and breathing in the world. I am always wondering how people negotiate their existences and how that may inform my understanding of those around me and myself. These conversations we’ve had over the past few months have helped me progress in my journey of comprehending my place in the world and what it is that I’m supposed do somewhere down the road.

Earlier this semester I gave a speech at an annual event at Vassar known as the Black Solidarity Dinner. The event has historically served as a space to honor the students of color at Vassar and provide an opportunity to reflect on how to continue and maintain an important group of solidarity.  This year I was asked to be the student speaker for the event. The speech I gave discussed part of this journey that I described a few moments ago, the journey to gain a better understanding of who I was. I wanted to read a little bit from it because though I was talking about how to build international solidarity, I feel like those words still apply to what I have been lucky to be a part of in terms of being a member of this community.

So here it is…

During that semester abroad, the program required that each student conduct field research and produce a lengthy report, also known as the Independent Study Project or ISP for short. I chose to write my ISP about the “Swahili” community in Oman and the ways, if at all, Swahili as a language and a cultural influence impacted the experiences of the members of this community. During that research period, among many things, I learned that I was not alone in the struggle to incorporate myself in a sometimes-narrow definition of what it means to be the citizen of one’s homeland. Interview after interview, I heard testimonies about what it meant to be an Omani and how we as people should not feel forced to identify as one thing. There was one respondent in particular that gave me an incredible testimony during my interview with him that I try to share with people whenever I get the chance.

For purposes of confidentiality I will refer to him as Hakeem, which is Arabic for the wise man. The day that I was interviewing Hakeem, we were sitting in his office. He is an art professor at one of the public university in the country, Sultan Qaboos University and has written extensively about Swahili and East Africa. Hakeem is a man of poise and few words. My conversation with him was my first official interview in my field research and I was nervous about the situation and afraid I would say the wrong thing. For most of the discussion he seemed a bit off-put and not entirely engaged with any of my questions. One of the questions during my interview was, “How would you feel if someone identified you as Swahili? What does that mean to you?” Hakeem sat back, looked me straight in the eyes and said, “I am many identities and I have no problems with that: Arab, because of paternal ancestry. I am African because I was born there and I speak an African language. I am Omani because it is the country of my ancestors. I am Zanzibari because that is where I was born and grew up. I am a Muslim because that is my religion. I am a human being not just because I am a son of Adam but I see myself as a civil person. People should not be pressed into one identity. There is overlap and no contradiction.”

“There is overlap and no contradiction”, those were the words that stuck with me the most. As I walked away from that interview I had finally become comfortable with the complexity of who I was. For a long time I had been saying that I didn’t want to be diminished to solely a bilingual student or just Dominican, or just black, etc. but it was not until that conversation with Hakeem that I fully accepted who I was. What I am trying to say is that at least in my journey and from understanding, to build solidarity I have found it to be valuable to comprehend who you are first. To have the ability to accept your complex identity as a person of color and then give yourself the opportunity to re-define and re-conceptualize that intricacy in different spaces and contexts enables you to make strong connections with people who have equally complex identities and different lived experiences from your own. As Hakeem eloquently stated, that it is important to understand where you overlap and don’t contradict, in terms of who you are in order to be better prepared to understand the overlapping of identities in those you chose to be in solidarity with. I got closer to learning whom I was, through learning about others who did not necessarily have the same lived experiences, but ones that were equally complicated and parallel in many ways. I believe it is important to know you are in your attempt to build bridges with those you may not know much about or anything at all, or even the ones you think you know well. It is in that process of understanding where effective solidarity can occur, be it here in Otisville or Vassar.

Thank you for being willing to build that solidarity with me and the other members of the class this semester. I have once again been lucky enough to have eye-opening conversations and the ability to speak with people who always speak with conviction and willingess to listen to the opinions of others.

-Kleaver Cruz '11 [for Bridging the Gap's Appreciation Day @ Otisville] 

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. 

"The internship at Otisville gave me a first-hand understanding of the United States' criminal justice system--and specifically, of the people who are arguably most affected by it and with whom I would otherwise have had a very limited opportunity to interact. The experience enhanced my education outside Vassar's classrooms, providing I and the other students with a more well-rounded, in-your-face reminder that life exists beyond our campus. It challenged me to go beyond off-campus institutions that are more easily accessible- and perhaps more widely accepted as "worth" visiting - than a correctional facility. Through participating in dialogue sessions with the inmates at Otisville, I formed some of the closest relationships I've made  in the past three-plus years at Vassar."
-Abby Raskin '11