This first appeared in Lead The Change: A Resource for Aspiring Leaders in Sustainability Stacy Burnett has a powerful idea to shake up the big-business of prison re-entry: hire formerly incarcerated people to mentor folks who are newly released. Stacy, a current Bard MBA student,… Read More
BPI Summer Residency 2023: What to Know Before You Arrive
Schedule Check here for last year’s schedule as a close schedule for the one that is to come for the 2023 year. Getting Here For directions and area information, please refer to the Bard College Visitors page, here. The nearest train station is in Rhinecliff. Visit Amtrak… Read More
BPI Reads: Scenes From My Life
BPI’s community reading event brings together students, faculty, and staff in and out of prison. At the start of each new year, BPI hosts its annual community reading event, BPI Reads. Through this event, BPI students, faculty, and staff reflect and engage in conversation around… Read More
Education Programs: Using Restorative Justice to Transform The Educational Space
The Bard Prison Initiative Education Fellowship is in full swing. This year we have four dedicated and creative cohorts. They are working at various junctures in the educational space, but their mission to foster more equity, more social and emotional awareness in the public… Read More
Black History Month Alumni Voices: The Sentimental Student
For BPI, every month is a month to study and celebrate Black History. As Bard College students, BPI students become scholars in their own right, not just absorbing course material but producing vital contributions to the literature. This February we asked BPI alumni what… Read More
International Congress on Higher Education in Prisons in Argentina, April 2023
BPI is pleased to announce that through support from the Open Society University Network (OSUN) and in partnership with Incarceration Nations Network (INN), we have funded an International Congress on Higher Education in Prisons that will take place in Buenos Aires, Argentina this spring.… Read More
Alumni Voices: Jose Pérez ’13
On the onset of the pandemic, BPI developed a newsletter that was sent to incarcerated students weekly to retain communication between students and the college. The newsletter contained news and updates from across BPI’s 7 in-prison campuses; the Bard Microcolleges in Holyoke, Brooklyn, and… Read More
Community Updates: Gardening Across BPI’s Campuses
The gardens at Fishkill, Taconic, and Woodbourne are all put to bed for the winter. We had a challenging season, with little water and a lot of heat, but students at all three facilities worked in solidarity with the plants they were growing, all… Read More
BPI Debate Union
Since 2014, almost 100 students have been members of the BPI Debate Union, building a successful record against debaters from internationally respected programs including teams such as Harvard, Cambridge, and Morehouse. Read More
Looking Back: JSTOR’s origins in prison
Recently ITHAKA S+R has made a major push to expand access to JSTOR inside prisons not just for incarcerated college students but to increase access to academic journals for all incarcerated people. This development comes more than a decade after BPI pioneered the idea… Read More