+
Sign up for
The Upworthiest
Our top stories of the day delivered straight to your inbox.
upworthy

prison reform

Education

Inmates in California prison can exit with a better chance of success due to first college behind bars

Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash

College education in prisons is a no-brainer.

Prison is supposed to serve two purposes: punishment and rehabilitation. But often prisoners emerge with the skills to be a better criminal and little knowledge on how to live an improved life. A prison in California is hoping to change the revolving door effect for some inmates by being the first to have a fully accredited junior college behind bars.

At Mount Tamalpais College at San Quentin State Prison inmates can earn an Associate of Arts degree by taking classes in literature, American government, astronomy and precalculus. The college was named after the mountain next to the prison and was accredited in January after a commission determined the extension program at the prison was providing a high-quality education. The college can accommodate up to 300 prisoners, and is currently full with another 200 on the waiting list.

San Quentin State Prison is broken up into different sections, including a section housing death row. It has offered rehabilitation programs to prepare inmates for a life outside of prison walls for some time. In the medium security part of the prison, inmates have dozens of educational, self-help and job-training opportunities that they can take advantage of. The positive programming available to inmates makes San Quentin a sought-after prison for prisoners across the state who want to utilize the time they must spend behind bars.

Derry Brown, 49, is currently serving a 20-year sentence for burglary and assault. He earned his GED in prison and is now attending the college program. Brown told ABC News that he takes pride in being a college student and may pursue a music career in his hometown of Los Angeles when he is released from prison next year. "There’s a joy in learning - that’s why I want to continue. Even when I get out, I’m going back to college,” he said.

The college is privately funded by donations and includes paid staff and volunteer faculty members, many of whom are graduate students from Stanford and the University of California Berkeley. The annual budget to run the college is $5 million. This isn’t the first program of its kind at the prison, though it is the first one to be fully accredited. In 1996, there was a program eventually titled Prison University Project that also offered associate degrees. President Jody Lewen started the process to have the college run fully autonomously three years ago after the previous university closed and the partnership ended.

Lewen told ABC News, “Very often in the field of higher ed, people will look at educational programs in prisons and they’ll say, ‘Well, that’s a program or project. It’s not a school.’ Our hope is that by being an independent, accredited, liberal arts college that operates in a prison we make it more difficult for people to overlook those inside and we help them imagine our students differently.”

The program is open to any general population prisoner with a GED or high school diploma, but excludes death row inmates.

Prison education is known to change the outcome of people’s lives when they are released, and this in turn can help change their families' lives and the generational course that may have been set before them. The hope is that the recidivism rate for lower level crimes would be reduced with former inmates now having a solid education and plan for the future.

From Your Site Articles
Related Articles Around the Web
prison reform
More

New York state is reforming solitary confinement.

Thousands of people spend months alone in a tiny cell. New York is doing something to fix that problem.

Approximately 78,000 people currently live in New York prisons.

Almost 4,000 of them live in tiny cells the size of a bathroom, closed off from most human contact. It’s a troubling practice, which is why New York has decided to make some key changes to its solitary confinement rules.

Image by jmiller291/Flickr.

A major lawsuit recently pointed out the horrific conditions of solitary confinement.

Based on that lawsuit, brought by the New York Civil Liberties Union, New York state will now be placing fewer prisoners in solitary cells. If they are placed in solitary, the folks will stay there for a shorter time, and they won’t have to face as many extreme conditions.

While this is an incredibly important step forward, it also demonstrates how much more work needs to be done to reform prisons in America.

The thousands of people serving time in solitary confinement on a daily basis wake up in a box that’s about 6 feet by 10 feet. They often spend their entire day without any human contact or even a book to read. And sometimes, they don’t even have access to palatable, nutritious food.

In New York, the average inmate who gets sentenced to solitary confinement will stay there for 190 days.

Let that sink in: Six whole months in the same tiny room with almost no one to talk to, nothing to do, and sometimes nothing nutritious to eat.

Screenshot from NYCLU/YouTube.

Typically, isolation is used as a disciplinary measure for prisoners who have committed infractions. But research has shown that forcing a prisoner to spend a lot of time alone in a room with no human contact and limited recreation doesn’t help to improve their behavior.

People who have served time in extreme isolation understandably have difficulty transitioning back to life outside a small cell. A report by the NYCLU also found that solitary causes "severe emotional and psychological consequences," which can lead to aggression and outbursts, both inside prison and when they’re released.

For the next five years, New York has committed to making prison isolation better.

Not perfect, but better. Here’s what’s that means, specifically:

1. Almost one-quarter of the inmates who are currently in solitary will be placed in different programs — ones that are safer, allow for human interaction, and are meant to rehabilitate the people involved. New York will operate under the premise that people who are developmentally disabled, addicted to drugs, or in need to behavioral therapy shouldn’t be denied the help they need.

2. The people who remain in solitary won’t be there indefinitely. For most disciplinary violations, there’s now a three-month cap on isolation.

3. And the actual experience of solitary confinement will be a little more humane, too. Some inmates will have more access to mental health services and therapy, and everyone will get to make occasional phone calls to family. Also, food can’t be used as punishment anymore.

People who are in prison are still people. And prisons are called "correctional institutions" for a reason: They’re supposed to help people rehabilitate.

That’s why New York’s decision to overhaul solitary confinement is so important.

Photo via iStock.

It’s also why this overhaul needs to be the first of many, many steps.

More

Alicia Keys released a beautiful video to get 1 million signatures for prison reform.

"Is this who we are now? Is this who we want to be?"

Those were questions first asked by superstar artist Alicia Keys in a Capitol Hill briefing on Nov. 10, 2015, about the alarming state of mass incarceration in the United States. Knowing that the "land of the free" has more people in prison than any other nation in the world, she is now asking those same questions to her millions of fans — and asking them to do something about it.

All images via Alicia Keys/YouTube.

Her new campaign, #WeAreHere for #JusticeReformNow is a partnership between her organization, We Are Here, and Cut 50, an organization that aims to cut the U.S. prison population in half over the next 10 years. The campaign is asking 1 million people to sign a petition that calls on Congress and the White House to take action now.

Keys is latest in a string of celebrities who have recently begun to shine a light on America's mass incarceration crisis. And with good reason.

The issue of mass incarceration is one that touches on so many devastating challenges within our society.

This complex issue is tied to racism, poverty, and inequality (as those who are incarcerated are overwhelmingly black, brown, and poor and receive harsher sentences for the same crimes as their white counterparts), the economy (the prison system is big business for private companies but costs the nation between $30K-100K a year to incarcerate just one person), as well as the issue that is most important to Keys and her organization: the impact of mass incarceration on children and families.

As she says in the beautiful campaign launch video:

"Too many families — and our communities — are being destroyed by mass incarceration. ... Mothers stripped of their sons, husbands, and fathers. Entire neighborhoods torn apart by the War on Drugs. And families struggling to stay together. We need policy reforms that can keep people out of prison who don't need to be there, and ensure that our justice system helps to heal communities, families, and individuals."

(It is, of course, worth noting that not only men are incarcerated. The number of incarcerated women has also increased at an alarming rate over the past decade.)

But whether we're discussing men or women, mothers or fathers, young or old, fundamentally, the root of the problem is about how society views and treats people who have committed crimes, especially nonviolent ones.

Can we really afford the social costs of throwing away countless citizens for drug addiction, desperate responses to poverty, and youthful mistakes? Or are there better, more just, and effective ways to hold people accountable and keep our communities safe?

Criminal-justice-reform advocate Bryan Stevenson, in his famous TED talk and must-read bestselling book, "Just Mercy," certainly thinks so. He believes that the only way to heal our society and end the obviously ineffective cycle of crime and punishment is to stop abandoning broken people, which is an approach that ultimately breaks more people. Instead, we must develop a criminal justice system based on rehabilitation, mercy, and solutions to the root causes of crime. But what does that look like?

What do advocates suggest we do right now?

Well, for starters, Alicia Keys' #WeAreHere for #JusticeReformNow campaign is urging 1 million people to sign a petition demanding Congress and the White House pass meaningful criminal justice reforms before the close of the year. She joins the thousands of other Americans who are asking for laws that do three things:

1. Send fewer people into a broken system that often destroys lives and separates families.

2. Invest in education, rehabilitation, and treatment rather than incarceration and punishment.

3. Address economic, civil, and social barriers to re-entry that can make it difficult for fathers and mothers to participate fully in society once they return home.

There are several bills proposed in Congress, like the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act and the SAFE Justice Act, that address some of these concerns. But public support is necessary to encourage swift action.

Check out her powerful video below and learn more about the campaign at Cut50.org.

Trending Stories