Transformation Through Education: College Behind Bars and the Bard Prison Initiative

By Danielle A. Martin ‘20

For some Americans, a college education is a realistic expectation. For others, it remains an inaccessible dream. The Bard Prison Initiative, founded in 1999 by Bard student Max Kenner, challenges the idea of whom higher education serves. What started as a humble Trustee-Leader Scholar project initiated after the elimination of Pell Grants for prisoners in 1994, has blossomed into a wildly successful non-profit organization now featured in its own Ken Burns documentary, College Behind Bars. 

The film follows BPI students as they navigate not just the world of academia, but the American prison system as well. It asks the questions that BPI has been asking since the organization was founded: Whom is education for? How does education form and reform students? How do we as Americans shift our understanding of higher education from a privileged rite of passage to a human right? Although BPI does not focus on why its students have been incarcerated, College Behind Bars explores some of the forces that confront them. Often, BPI students are men of color who began their prison terms as teenagers. 

I remember that when I was in high school applying to colleges, some adults pulled me aside to tell me that a liberal arts education was a waste of money, that employers would prefer a more ‘focused’ educational track. College Behind Bars and the Bard Prison Initiative demonstrate that a liberal arts education is not only meaningful but also transformative—perhaps even redemptive. The students featured in the film do not leave the classroom merely ‘educated’; they leave their classrooms with a better understanding of themselves, the world they inhabit, and the options they have to overcome the obstacles in front of them. 

In an article for Reasons to Be Happy titled  “I’m Not That Guy Anymore,” BPI Alumnus Alexander Hall writes that the state university he attended “had developed its pedagogical approaches from the same manuals my public schools had: isolated and inapplicable to the life I lived outside. It seemed pointless to me to memorize formulas that I thought had no relationship to the real world.” After finding himself incarcerated, and later applying to BPI’s program, he discovered the world of academia had transformed into a system that “seemed to put words to so many things I had experienced, especially in my adolescence.” With a recidivism rate of less than 3%, it’s fair to say that BPI students feel similarly fulfilled by a liberal arts education. 

College Behind Bars airs on PBS, November 25th and 26th. Directed by Ken Burns and produced by Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein, the four-part documentary will bring national attention to both the American higher education system and the American justice system and how they intersect. More information on how to stream the program and how to support college in prison can be found on the Bard Prison Initiative website.

Post Date: 11-22-2019