In 2021, the University’s prison education program started courses at Attica, coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the prison uprising.
Editor’s note: This story was originally published on September 8, 2021. It has been updated and republished to reflect renewed funding for the Rochester Education Justice Initiative from the Mellon Foundation.Mellon Foundation renews support for Rochester Education Justice Initiative
In 2022, the Mellon Foundation renewed its support for the Rochester Education Justice Initiative (REJI) with an additional three-year, $1 million grant. The foundation awarded the University-affiliated prison education initiative a similar grant in 2020 and has been its principal funder. The second Mellon grant will enable REJI to continue its existing associate degree-granting programs at Attica and Groveland Correctional Facilities, expand operations to a third prison, Wyoming Correctional Facility, and realize its long-term goal of offering a bachelor’s degree to incarcerated students at Attica Correctional Facility. “We’re extraordinarily grateful to the Mellon Foundation for its transformative support. With this support, we are working with allies across the University to launch a BA program at Attica,” says Joshua Dubler, REJI’s faculty director and an associate professor in the Department of Religion and Classics. “Offering a bachelor’s degree to a highly motivated, qualified, and committed group of students will place the University of Rochester among the vanguard of higher education in prison.”Leading prison education in western New York
If Attica is uniquely suited as a site for a bachelor’s degree program, so too is the University of Rochester uniquely suited to lead it. REJI is among some 200 or so college-in-prison programs in the nation and one of several such programs in New York state. Founded in 2015 by associate professor of religion Joshua Dubler, the initiative got started with seed funding from Arts, Sciences & Engineering.The politics of prison education
It’s a stipulation of the partnership between GCC and Rochester that REJI has final say over admissions to the Attica program. But the applicants tend to be a self-selected group, and Freedenberg emphasizes that within certain parameters, admissions are “as open as possible.” Those parameters include some practical considerations. For example, REJI looks at applicants’ release dates to make sure that they can complete at least one semester. Successful applicants also can’t have any disciplinary actions on their records. Beyond those considerations, the selection process is largely based on written communication skills. “We do a lot of qualitative assessment of college readiness based on prospective students’ application essays,” Freedenberg says. One potential criterium that is not considered is the nature of the offense that landed the applicant in prison in the first place. That’s consistent with the philosophy that unites REJI’s faculty and staff. Incarcerated people are disproportionately poor and, Dubler says, “I’m really allergic to distinguishing between the deserving poor and the undeserving poor.” “We’re a pretty violent culture,” he explains, and one with “a habit of disposing of people. And prisons are one of the places we dispose of people.” Nearly every person you ask who has taught incarcerated people says they have been profoundly moved by the experience. Marianne Kupin-Lisbin, REJI’s program coordinator and a doctoral candidate in history at Rochester, says of her past teaching at Five Points, “to this day, I don’t think I’ve had a better pedagogical experience.” The students are hungry for an opportunity they have not had, giving the professor, and each other, their full attention. Freedenberg—who also notes that the students have no access to the internet—calls the incarcerated students he has taught “amazing. They are a really unique group of students who are committed to being a community of learners together. And they’re committed to the well-being of this program.” Those involved in prison education know not to take the well-being of the programs for granted, given the dramatic shifts in support for them over the past several decades. College-in-prison programs burgeoned following passage of the Higher Education Act in 1965. The act broadly expanded access to higher education through the creation of federal student loans, work-study programs, and most importantly, Pell grants—need-based awards available to students pursuing higher education, including students who were incarcerated. Fueled by these grants, by the early 1980s there were well over 300 college-in-prison programs run by colleges and universities across the country. Among the incarcerated students benefitting from Pell grants was Bedell. She had started community college in Syracuse when she was arrested and sentenced to serve at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women, in Westchester County. She completed a bachelor’s degree as well as a master’s degree in developmental psychology from Norwich University while incarcerated. “The administrators at Bedford Hills and at the Department of Corrections were just so supportive of people doing college programs, and we had graduations and certificates and vocational programs,” she recalls. It’s a more difficult environment for potential students in prisons today. In the immediate aftermath of the Attica uprising, a progressive spirit took hold leading to public discourse about the need to make prisons more humane, and in some quarters, to ask what compelled Americans to think prison was an appropriate or effective form of punishment in the first place. But coinciding with those impulses were others that headed in the opposite direction, responding to the uprising with a zeal for a tougher approach to crimes and to those convicted of them. The latter approach proved far more popular politically. Starting about 1974, incarceration rates ballooned. At the time of the Attica uprising, there were roughly 200,000 people in the United States in state and federal prisons, or 95 per 100,000 people in the US population, according to data from the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, which has been compiled by the Prison Policy Initiative. By 1977, it was 125 people per 100,000; by 1982, 170 people. In 1994, Congress passed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, commonly known as the crime bill. That year, there were more than 1.5 million people in state and federal prisons, amounting to just over 500 per 100,000 people—more than five times the rate in 1971. Among the provisions of the bill that ran more than 350 pages was the elimination of Pell grants for incarcerated people. Many states, including New York, followed suit, making incarcerated people ineligible for state-based assistance. Pell grant eligibility was restored late last year in a provision of the stimulus bill, which was included following the success of the Second Chance Pell, a Department of Education pilot program initiated in 2016. But the bill will not be fully implemented, according to the DOE, until the 2024–25 academic year. And in New York, incarcerated students remain ineligible for the Tuition Assistance Program (TAP).Investing in ‘human flourishing’
“That was a very sad era,” Bedell recalls, of the aftermath of the crime bill. With few incarcerated students able to afford courses, demand fell, and colleges and universities folded their programs. But some advocates of college-in-prison, including individual higher education faculty members, staff at correctional facilities, and incarcerated men and women, began collaborating to try to find means to deliver courses anyway. In the mid-1990s, Bedell says, some faculty members at a few downstate colleges began collaborating with incarcerated women at Bedford Hills and other facilities to offer occasional courses. Cornell’s CPEP program had similar origins. In recent years, foundations such as Mellon have provided substantial backing, helping generate something of a renaissance of college-in-prison programs. And universities, including Rochester, have offered resources as well. “In terms of offering credits at no cost, supporting faculty with on-load teaching, and supporting the recruitment of formerly incarcerated students, the University is stepping up,” Dubler says. Bedell credits both the Mellon Foundation and the University for enabling her to recruit formerly incarcerated men and women to become students at local institutions, including Rochester, where they study as Justice Scholars. “I’m excited about the possibility of continuing to build a cohort,” she says of the scholarship program that has so far enabled two formerly incarcerated students to pursue degrees at Rochester. In addition to staff at Bedford Hills, it was university faculty members who enabled Bedell to take her own desire to turn her life around and make it a reality. Geraldine Downey, a professor of psychology at Columbia, mentored her through a master’s thesis on resilience in women, providing her with research opportunities. That led Bedell to her career at the University, where for eight years she worked community health worker and a human subjects research coordinator in the Medical Center’s Department of Psychiatry. In 2015 the Medical Center’s Center for Community Health and Prevention awarded her the David Satcher Award for Community Health Improvement and in 2016, she was awarded a Staff Community Service Award by her Medical Center colleagues for her work with Turning Points Resource Center. “We’re using incarceration as a way to solve our social problems,” Bedell says. “The War on Drugs is also a war on the poor, particularly on women, who are the fastest growing segment in the prison population in the United States.” Dubler points to the correlation, over the past several decades, between public disinvestment in education and social supports and public investment in prisons. What if, he asks, we had been “investing instead in a set of institutions that could enable human flourishing?” Universities are such institutions, and they are, as Dubler says of Rochester, stepping up. But decades of mass incarceration makes their task sobering. When it comes to Attica in particular, Dubler asks: “How might Rochester’s offering of college courses there adequately respond to the legacy of the tragedy? It’s a humbling question, and one that we are hoping to figure out in collaboration with our institutional partners and our students.”Read more
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