3. Environmental Scan
College-in-prison programs in New York State
In the 1970s there were seventy higher education programs in prisons in New York State. By the mid-1990s, there were only four. In 2019, the number had slowly climbed to fifteen, which was still 80% fewer than forty years before. This meant that only 3% of the approximately 47,000 persons incarcerated in New York State could take college courses in 2019 (Prisoner Reentry institute).
John Jay College of Criminal Justice, one of the senior colleges of the City University of New York and one of the premier criminal justice and liberal arts institutions in the United States, is making it possible for hundreds of incarcerated people to earn college degrees. Bard College, Columbia University, Hamilton College, Marymount Manhattan College and New York University are also providing college-in-prison programs in New York State. In some of these programs, students who have not yet earned their degrees are guaranteed a place in college when they are released.
We got a rare look into The Bard Prison Initiative in 2019 through Lynn Novick and Ken Burns’s powerful documentary film College Between Bars (Novick). In this film, Novick follows twelve incarcerated men and women studying to earn college degrees while in prison. The stories of these men and women inspire optimism and hope because we see how their commitment and discipline lead them to achieve academic excellence, build community, and become leaders for others, setting an example of how transformative higher education can be. Many of the courses taught at Bard are humanities courses. They are all paper based.
Digital humanities courses were taught in prison as part of The Center for Justice at Columbia University’s Justice-in-Education Initiative (JIE) which offers credit-bearing college courses in the humanities and social sciences at Rikers Island, Taconic, Sing Sing and Bedford Hills (Justice-in-Education). The digital arts and humanities JIE offered starting in 2015 were mostly developed by Columbia’s Group for Experimental Methods in the Humanities, focused on social justice issues at Rikers Island and used minimal computing methods. These courses involved producing and recording songs with iPads, learning to code and producing a Twitter feed called Rikers Bot in an automated Twitter account (Rikers Bot), designing games, learning to build websites and develop aesthetic and technical skills in graphic design. Giving these students this opportunity to experiment and create is pedagogy at its most useful and best.
Marymount Manhattan College’s Bedford Hills College Program (BHCP) offers women incarcerated at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility credit-bearing courses leading to an Associates of Arts degree in Social Sciences and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Sociology. Bedford Hills has a networked computer lab without internet (Bedford Hills). Based on my research, Bedford Hills does not offer courses in digital humanities.
The New York University Prison Education Program (NYU PEP) offers an Associate of Arts degree to men incarcerated at Wallkill Correctional Facility in Ulster County, New York. Walkill has audiovisual technology in its classroom or classrooms and a computer lab (NYU Prison Education Program). Based on my research, NYU PEP does not offer digital humanities courses.
The Institute for Justice and Opportunity at CUNY’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice has a program called the Prison-to-College Pipeline (P2CP) which funnels students into college to complete degrees they start at Otisville Correctional Facility in upstate New York. P2CP students are incarcerated adults who have high school diplomas or GEDs, are sentenced to fewer than five years and pass CUNY reading and writing assessment tests. All students who maintain passing grades are guaranteed admission to a CUNY institution upon release (Prison-to-College Pipeline). P2CP’s academic program includes courses in Anthropology, English, Sociology and others. As far as I can tell, no digital humanities courses are currently taught at Otisville.
Programs and initiatives in other states and other countries
At San Quentin State Prison in California a nonprofit startup education program called The Last Mile is teaching incarcerated students to code. Founded by Chris Redlitz, a Californian venture capitalist, The Last Mile’s stated mission is “to provide marketable skills that lead to employment” and secure incarcerated people jobs (The Last Mile). Trainees are taught to code in HTML, JavaScript, CSS and Python without internet connectivity through a proprietary programming platform. In 2016, Redlitz launched TLMWorks, a web development shop inside San Quentin where incarcerated graduates work for what the Last Mile website claims is “an industry standard wage” (The Last Mile). The Last Mile’s software is not open source. On the other hand, photographs show incarcerated coders working in a spacious room filled with desktops (The Last Mile) and I imagine they are learning a lot.
Finland and some other Scandinavian countries are using more and more technology in their successful prison reform programs, providing some incarcerated people with laptops and tablets that they can use in cells and libraries. The Scandinavian approach is rehabilitative and stands in stark contrast to the punitive approach to incarceration we find in the U.S.. And it works. Rates of incarceration, recidivism and prison violence in Scandinavian countries are the lowest in the world (Yukhnenko). According to British prison architect Roland Karthaus, this is due to a fundamental shift in how most people think about incarceration. “The Scandinavian mindset is that if someone is in prison, that’s our fault as a society,” he says. “We let you fall through the cracks, so it’s our responsibility to rehabilitate you.” In contrast, prisons in England not only aim to punish, but also want to be show taxpayers that they punish, with politicians constantly citing public opinion to justify draconian measures (Karthaus).
In 2019 a prison in Turku, Finland, offered incarcerated students a course in artificial intelligence. This course was originally designed at the University of Helsinki as a more accessible version of an Introduction to AI curriculum for computer science students. The AI in prison initiative was proposed by Pia Puolakka, a project manager at the Criminal Sanctions Agency, the governmental organization in charge of Finland’s prison system, using a free course designed by Reaktor, a tech consultancy group. According to Sanjana Varghese from Wired, Reaktor is working on a system that would allow incarcerated students to receive university credits and take other courses. The Finnish government embraced the scheme as a way of supporting the reintegration of incarcerated people into a digital-first employment market once they left prison (Varghese).
More and more initiatives for teaching technological and digital skills are starting to make their way into prisons around the world. In the U.S. it will take a long time for our broken system of chronically overcrowded prisons to catch up; prisons will likely only start to incorporate digital technology into their educational facilities when stakeholders see money to make. If and when this happens, dedicated faculty, staff, and administrators of educational initiatives in schools, colleges, universities and programs must be prepared to identify and advocate for an approach that will serve students, not marketing schemes.