6. P2CP at Otisville - a Case Study and Possible Proposal

Why Otisville

The Prison-to-College Pipeline (P2CP) program is CUNY’s college-in-prison program. It is run by the Institute for Justice and Opportunity at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at Otisville Correctional Facility in upstate New York. P2CP is a robust, proven program that has been in place since 2011 and aims to further CUNY’s mission of providing higher education to everyone who is eligible to go to college. This, notes P2CP Founding Director Baz Draesinger, “includes the prison population on a very basic level, [many of whom] did not have access to higher education to begin with or quality education before that.” In a sense, she said, “we’re enacting our duty as a society to offer people the education that they should have gotten in the first place” (“The Prison-to-College Pipeline”). These goals align perfectly with the goals of this project, namely, to extend opportunities for academic success within the field of digital humanities to incarcerated people and teach them transferrable skills that will serve them in seeking employment upon release. If an introductory digital humanities course were developed and piloted with P2CP students at Otisville, the students would benefit, the field of digital humanities would grow and benefit, and the mission of CUNY would be further advanced.

P2CP is funded by the Institute for Justice and Opportunity, and some tuition costs are covered by Obama’s First Step Act. CUNY professors travel to Otisville, which is 75 miles from the city, to teach accredited, credit-bearing college courses in English, sociology, anthropology, mathematics, and other liberal arts disciplines. There are also guest speakers, academic counseling, skills development workshops and the Learning Exchange, a credit-bearing course facilitated by a CUNY faculty member to expose students to academic topics beyond the standard course offerings and gives students at Otisville an opportunity to network with their peers from John Jay. Because P2CP is part of CUNY, P2CP students may want to go on to specialize in digital humanities or fields of study that incorporate digital humanities within CUNY and would receive support.

Logistics

Hardware

An introduction to digital humanities course for fifteen students would require seventeen laptops. Fifteen of these would be individual student laptops, one would be the instructor’s laptop, and the seventeenth would act as the server. Individual laptops would either be wired to the server with a LAN switch or connected wirelessly to the server via a router. The instructor(s) would also have one or two external hard drive(s) and/or USB stick for backup, course readings and additional resources. Two external CD/DVD drives would also be needed; one which would remain in the facility to read CD-ROMs and the other, which would not be brought to the prison, for the instructor(s) to burn additional software, programs and course material files to CD-ROMs if needed.

Programs and software

In traditional digital humanities courses, we rely greatly on resources available through the internet. Here, everything would have to live on sixteen laptops, USB sticks and the external hard drive(s). The computer programs and learning resources for the envisioned introduction to digital humanities course would be pre-installed on student laptops and/or the instructor(s)’s laptop. Students would submit assignments, share their work with each other and collaborate on projects through Ubuntu’s Public Folder, which would be accessed through the local network, and/or by using USB drives. Some of the built-in applications that come with Ubuntu, including the Libre Office suite and the three games (solitaire, mines and sudoku), could be made available to students.

Course delivery

A lot of the envisioned course would be delivered digitally in class on the course laptops. Readings can be both digital and printed. The printed reading matter can be assigned as homework. A lot of coding logic can also be assigned as homework and done with pen and paper, then tried out in class. Students should probably each be assigned a laptop at the beginning of the semester and continue to use the same laptop throughout the semester, as this would allow them to save things they are working on individually and give them ownership over their work and accountability for what they do with the laptop.

Because learning digital skills usually involves a lot of practice, it would be great if students were allowed to use their laptops in tutoring and/or study sessions outside of class.

Accessibility

The envisioned course site follows and must continue to follow the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Version 2.1 in order to make electronic content accessible to everyone who uses it. Following the CUNY Policy on Equal Opportunity and Non-Discrimination and in keeping with the guideline’s in CUNY’s IT accessibility Statement, the envisioned introduction to digital humanities course aims not only to be accessible but also to show students how to produce work within guidelines that makes their work accessible to everyone.

Security

It would probably be best if all hardware remained on the facility. This way the security screening of the hardware would only have to be done twice, once at the beginning of the course and once at the end (unless it stays in the prison for subsequent use). If the instructor(s) needed to bring additional material such as computer programs, software or files to the facility, it might be a good idea to bring these on a read-only CD-ROM rather than a USB because in New York State prisons all removable storage devices are contraband (Directive 4911, Attachment A).

For security reasons it might be best if students worked on the same computer in each class session for the duration of the course and saved their work on that computer. It would be good if students could also save their work on USBs, which could be labeled and kept with the laptops.

One of the exciting challenges that this course presents is to map out and prepare everything students need to achieve course learning goals in ways that work around significant prison-specific constraints.

Hardware cost estimate

Minimal computing prompts us to find computing solutions only for what is really needed, at the lowest possible cost. The hardware listed here is what seems to me strictly necessary for the delivery of the course, keeping in mind monetary cost, cost in labor and cost in student effort as well as other hidden costs. As there may be a computer lab at Otisville Correctional Facility, I considered whether the course could be done without the laptops. I imagine that it could, but relying on computers probably with Windows operating systems and a variety of programs already installed would make it a lot more difficult to set up, and would entail troubleshooting issues that would almost certainly arise during installation as well as in class. In my opinion what we gain in working in Ubuntu, a free open source operating system widely used by software developers, justifies the cost of buying seventeen laptops.

The following estimate is for the hardware only; I have not estimated the cost of travel to and from Otisville or instructor(s) stipend(s) or anything else.

Sample course content

A model-in-development for an introduction to digital humanities course for prison is on this website’s sibling site Intro to DH

Illustration by Gisella Lopez, 2020, licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 License.

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