We have been deeply moved by the incredible response to College Behind Bars and to BPI alumni coming in from across social media. Add #CollegeBehindBarsPBS to your must watch list! It is a marvelous new film by @KenBurns, @LynnNovick, and @sbotstein! You can find it… Read More
Access to higher ed for incarcerated students is essential to criminal justice reform
As College Behind Bars puts a spotlight on the issue of college in prison, 25 years after the removal of Pell Grants for people in prison, BPI Alumnus Darren Mack '13 shares his thoughts on higher education’s role in criminal justice reform and the… Read More
Jule Hall ’09 and Lynn Novick sit down with WNYC’s Brian Lehrer to discuss ’College Behind Bars’
This morning, the documentary filmmaker Lynn Novick and BPI Alumnus Jule Hall ’11 discussed College Behind Bars with Brian Lehrer. Check out the full conversation below: Read More
Op-Ed: Some of My Proudest Accomplishments Happened in Prison. How Should I Talk About Them?
When my day begins with my phone buzzing 10 times in a row, it’s usually a bad sign. This time was different. My friends were going wild because a follow-up story about our debate team’s 2016 victory against Harvard University was trending on Apple… Read More
Op-Ed: Former incarcerated student: Society owes men and women in prison chance to return whole
PBS documentary shows how higher education helped me remove the shackles of incarceration. College degrees in prison can do the same for others. I am choosing to publicly out myself as a convicted felon in this column. Let me tell you why. In March of… Read More
20 Years of Bard Behind Bars
At a recent orientation session for newly enrolled Bard students at Taconic Correctional Facility, I found myself thinking about my own undergraduate experience and the ways Bard connects people across campuses and decades. We were there to talk about the extended world of the… Read More
An Insider’s Perspective
With fresh pens, sharpened pencils, and brand new composition notebooks, we took our seats in the classroom for the first day of Language and Thinking—not as inmates, but as classmates. The stress and tension that seem to burst through every crack and crevice of… Read More
Creative Loafing: “Gripping Documentary Spotlights Bard Prison Initiative”
BPI Alumni Dyjuan Tatro '18 and Wesley Caines '09 were interviewed about their experiences are BPI students and what they hope the film College Behind Bars accomplishes. The interview, reproduced below, first appeared in creativeloafing.com ‘College Behind Bars’ packs a rehabilitative punch Gripping documentary spotlights Bard… Read More
Documentary Provides Rare Look at Higher Education in Prison
Emerson College launched the Emerson Prison Initiative (EPI) and joined the Consortium in 2017 with an initial cohort of twenty students at Massachusetts Correctional Institute at Concord who began coursework in the fall of 2017. With assistance from BPI, EPI is expanding course offerings… Read More
‘Undoing a mistake’: Inside the push to bring college education back to prison
This article, reproduced below, first appeared in USA Today. PHILADELPHIA – Stacks of books are organized meticulously by genre amid the chaos of a maximum security prison. A makeshift desk made from cardboard is placed over a sink in a cramped cell. A chalkboard is filled with… Read More