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CHAPTER 1
Learning to Learn
An Outcome of College in Prison
Joe Williams was born in Brooklyn, New York, on February 16, 1979. His parents were teenagers. After he was born, his mother moved through a series of fairly well-paying jobs. She worked as a receptionist and a corrections officer and then joined the army, obtaining the rank of E-4 Specialist. From there, she moved on to a position as a supervisor for the Metropolitan Transit Authority. According to Joe, his father went in a different direction, becoming "a career criminal and drug abuser." He was in and out of prison, and not around most of the time, and was shot and killed in an ambush intended for Joe. Joe carries his father's picture on his phone to this day.
Although as a youngster he was exposed to crime and neighborhood violence, Joe has many happy memories from his childhood, growing up in a large extended family as the oldest child and grandchild on both sides. On his mother's side, he has one younger sister; on his father's side, he has "too many [siblings] to know how many for certain." He has stayed in touch with the four youngest. His happiest childhood memories involve playing with cousins, especially on Christmas morning, when, he fondly recalls, the kids would spy on the adults as they wrapped the presents. During summer vacations, the family would pile into someone's car and drive all the way to North Carolina for family reunions; they would stay for a few days and then pile back into the car for the return trip to Brooklyn.
Joe's experience at school produced few good memories. For one thing, he attended several different schools, starting elementary school at Pilgrim Christian Academy in Bushwick and then being transferred to P.S. 298 in Brownsville. Thereafter, he went to two different junior high schools. At William McKinley Junior High School in Bay Ridge, he started getting into fights and stealing from students he had seen acting as bullies to weaker kids. He got kicked out of that school and went to George Gershwin Intermediate School 166 in East New York, where he also got into trouble. Although he was not kicked out, he was not allowed to graduate with his class. He was promoted nonetheless and moved on to Thomas Jefferson High School, also in East New York, which he says was "one of the worst high schools in Brooklyn" at the time. There, he continued to get into trouble and was again kicked out. His grandmother then enrolled him in a GED program, which he completed just before turning sixteen.
As Joe describes his school experience, it was at best a minor interruption in his "real life." He spent most of his time selling drugs, writing rap songs, smoking marijuana, and "just generally scheming about ways to make it out of poverty for my family and me." He was about twelve when he committed his first crime, painting a cap gun black and using it to commit a robbery. He started selling drugs when he was thirteen, and by his fourteenth birthday he "was hustling full time, committing crimes daily." This resulted in a number of arrests and convictions, with time spent locked up for a couple of months at Spofford, a juvenile facility in Hunts Point; then for a month at the Rikers Island jail; and finally, for four years, in a New Jersey state prison on charges of trafficking drugs and guns across state lines. At the age of twenty-four, he began what he describes as his "final stint" in prison, serving a sentence of just under eleven years in New York State, mostly in maximum-security prisons.
Joe says that during the first years of this sentence he did a lot of thinking about who he was and wanted to be and what he needed to do in order to go home ready to establish "a legitimate life for himself and his family." Things started to look up when he landed a job as a peer facilitator for the Transitional Services Center at the Clinton Correctional Facility. That job convinced him that he wanted to work in counseling when he was released. But to be eligible for that kind of work, he knew he would have to get a college degree. In 2007, an opportunity to do that opened up. Having been moved to the Eastern Correctional Facility, one of the places where the Bard Prison Initiative operates, Joe applied and was admitted. By the time he was released from prison in August 2013, he had earned both an associate's and a bachelor's degree. "My decision to pursue a college degree had to do with my strategic planning for my release," he explains.
By being so deliberate in planning his postprison life, after returning home to live with his mother and stepfather, Joe soon landed a job as a checkout clerk at a takeout lunch place in Midtown Manhattan. As a college graduate, he was overqualified for the position, but he stuck with it so he could concentrate on returning to school to earn a master's in social work. He was admitted to the accelerated program in social work policy at the Columbia University School of Social Work and began the program in January 2014, only months after his release from prison. He graduated in May 2015, having accumulated over $100,000 in debt, and moved right into a position as a civil justice social worker at Brooklyn Defender Services. Joe had interned there as a youth advocate while at Columbia and has now helped several of his college classmates also get jobs working with that agency.
Joe is confident he will never go back to prison. But he has not found going straight easy. He once remarked that for someone who has really "lived in high style," a good but relatively modest salary is a serious adjustment. He knows, though, that he is building a solid life and that his work is helping him realize his ambition to take his life in a positive direction. He has married a New York City public school teacher and is actively involved with the one child he had before going to prison, a daughter whom he calls his "butterfly princess," and he and his wife now also have an infant son. He is determined that his children will finish high school, go on to college, and maybe even follow in his footsteps, not to prison, but to graduate school.
Joe's determination comes through emphatically when he speaks about realizing that going to college "was what I knew I needed to succeed" for himself and his family. Once he went to prison, "trouble was not an option," he says. It would interfere with his plan to leave prison prepared for a new life. He participated in what he describes as a few "peripheral" activities that would enhance his résumé, including learning American Sign Language, volunteering in the Youth Assistance Program, and earning a certificate in food handling. To stay in shape, he played football and lifted weights, and for his spiritual well-being he became a devout Christian. But once he started college, that became his primary focus, and his commitment to studying hard paid off with a 3.5 grade-point average.
Joe Williams's story demonstrates what can happen when people are given a second chance to obtain a high-quality education. College classes awakened a thirst for knowledge in him and opened his eyes to new ideas. He reports that he was fascinated by the insights he gained from several psychology classes as well as from a new understanding of American history. A social studies major, he especially "loved the classes that expounded on the social construction of race and the development of the systems that strategically were put in place to keep my people ostracized from power." He says that being held to a high academic standard was vital in igniting his passion for learning, and he notes, "People tend to think that incarcerated individuals are not intellectuals. However, the faculty at Bard expected, required, and would not settle for anything less than our best. As incarcerated students, we internalized their belief in us, which we might not have developed on our own, from our own previous accomplishments, especially those relating to academia."
Joe's experience powerfully illustrates the wide range of positive outcomes for students who go to college in prison. In recent years, much of the discussion concerning the purposes of higher education has focused on the economic payoffs not only for the individual, due to improved employment prospects, but for the country as a whole, due to the increasing number of jobs requiring college-level education. The same economic focus has dominated arguments for college for all. Even though economic security is a vitally important outcome of a college education, as longtime Harvard president Derek Bok has argued, a narrow focus on economic payoffs has tended to obscure an important set of additional benefits, which Joe's account underscores. As Bok describes the purposes of college, it should impart "useful knowledge," prepare people for "enlightened" citizenship, and ready them to live a "full and satisfying life." To believe that college is solely about preparing people to get good jobs is to adopt a "shrunken conception of the role of higher learning," Bok maintains, one that "ignores what were long regarded as the most essential aims of education: strengthening students' moral character and preparing them to be active, informed citizens." In a similar vein, former Princeton president Harold T. Shapiro argues that what matters most about the college experience "is not simply what we teach, or even what our students learn, but what kind of persons they become." Expanding on the same theme, moral philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum has observed that college learning can and should promote the capacity to question and reflect on oneself and one's society, cultivating the ability to see oneself in relation to other human beings around the world and to put oneself in others' shoes, thereby nurturing a person's full humanity.
While arguments such as these have historically supported the value of a traditional liberal arts education, today they apply to postsecondary education generally. The National Leadership Council for Liberal Education, a group convened by the Association of American Colleges and Universities, emphasized in a report on college learning that there are "recommended learning outcomes" that "can and should be achieved through many different programs of study and in all collegiate institutions, including colleges, community colleges and technical institutes, and universities, both public and private." The council, on which both Bok and Nussbaum served, also offered a clear delineation of the benefits college can provide: "expanding horizons, building understanding of the wider world, honing analytical and communication skills, and fostering responsibilities beyond self."
As college-for-all advocates argue, these benefits are clearly important for everyone. For people in prison, they can be especially significant because so many of the incarcerated have not had positive prior experiences with education. Many had no expectation of being able to go to college, and many discover talents they did not know they had, in the process learning to learn at a high level, and finding that they enjoy the challenge. Joe's comments about the importance of being held to high standards express the value he found in having to push himself to the limit.
The importance of enabling people in prison to discover their competence as learners is underscored by the glaring gap in educational achievement that exists between those who are incarcerated and the general population. Forty-one percent of people in custody in state and federal prisons and in local jails are high school dropouts, compared to 18 percent among the general population. Only 14.4 percent of those serving time in state prisons reported having some postsecondary education, as opposed to 51 percent of adults in the nonincarcerated U.S. population. There are a variety of reasons for this gap. Many people in prison grew up in neighborhoods with schools so inadequate that they have been labeled "failing," with some having been taken over by the state to be reconstituted. Such schools are known not only for their poor test scores, but often also for their severe suspension policies, commonly known as "zero tolerance" policies. They expel far too many students and this is especially true for African American boys.
Many of those who end up in prison also lacked the close parental supervision and experience of reading at home or listening to stories that have so much to do with developing a joy of learning and achieving school success. Research by sociologist Annette Lareau of the University of Pennsylvania, among others, has provided strong evidence that parenting styles play an important role in school outcomes, and that parenting styles of poor and working-class families tend to differ significantly from those of the middle class. In her book Unequal Childhoods, Lareau reports the results of a study of eighty-eight families from different income levels, parental employment, races, and neighborhoods. Her analysis shows that the children of poor and working-class parents generally have more unstructured time, during which parents do not closely supervise them, whereas the children of middle-class parents are scheduled more often to participate in activities. Middle-class parents were also found to engage in more conversation with their children, and impressed upon them the importance of success in school. However indirectly, all this contributes to differences in rates of incarceration.
Significant numbers of men and women in prison have also spent time in foster care or group homes, and many were abused as children. A study of the prior lives of the students who have participated in the Freedom Education Project Puget Sound, which offers college to women incarcerated at the Washington Correction Center for Women, found that 78 percent of the women had been victims of domestic abuse or childhood sexual or physical abuse. Many became mothers as young teenagers. Another study, published by the U.S. Department of Justice, reported that one-third of all women in state prisons or jails had been abused as children. The percentage is lower for men, but for both men and women, childhood abuse among the incarcerated is roughly twice as high as for the nonincarcerated population. These challenges in the early lives of so many of the incarcerated have much to do with why they either performed poorly in school or had disciplinary problems that undermined their learning. Even students who like going to school and do well are sometimes pulled away by the challenging situations of their lives.
Of course, many of those who are in prison chose to drop out of school, or were forced out, because they had already gotten in trouble with the law. Sometimes a parent, or an uncle, sibling, or cousin, leads a child into selling drugs or some other criminal activity. One college student recollected his mother sending him to work for an uncle who was selling drugs. He was only twelve years old at the time, but his mother needed the money he could earn to support her drug habit. He was eventually arrested and sent to prison. Ironically, after he enrolled in college, when his mother came to visit, she apparently would tell him that he was finally improving, as if she had not played a role in his situation. Friends or older acquaintances from one's neighborhood or fellow gang members are often guides into crime. For some young people, schools, even good ones, are no competition for the street.
The negative school experiences, and negative attitudes about school, that many of the incarcerated developed might be expected to cause a lack of interest in college. But in spite of all the difficulties and choices that impaired school success for so many of them earlier in their lives, men and women in prison are often extremely eager to attend college and want to overcome their prior negative experiences with education. Almost all of the small number of degree-granting prison college programs in existence today are oversubscribed. Even with a selective admission process, requiring candidates to take a challenging written essay exam and submit to an interview, Bard has an applicant-to- admittance ratio of ten to one. Often students must apply several times before gaining entrance, which requires courage as well as persistence, and for those who fail to gain entrance, it is a tough embarrassment since it is widely known throughout the facility who has sat for the exam and who was granted an interview. Other postsecondary programs that have selective admissions also have astounding ratios of applicants to admitted students. Among the seventy men who attended the initial selection meeting for the Prison Entrepreneurship Program in Texas, fifty ultimately sought entrance, though only a handful could be admitted. At programs such as the Prison University Project at San Quentin that are not selective, admitting students on a first-come, first-served basis, the ratios of those who want to participate to those enrolled are also high and there are long waiting lists.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Liberating Minds"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Ellen Condliffe Lagemann.
Excerpted by permission of The New Press.
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