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
Celebrating the launch of The Lilac House
The program, part of A New Way of Life's SAFE Housing Network, will bring needed resources to formerly incarcerated women in Westchester, NY. I founded The Lilac House project in April of 2022. The organization will address the lack of transitional housing for formerly incarcerated… Read More
Consortium Webinar Series
This fall, BPI kicked off our Consortium technical assistance webinar series which grows out of one on one technical assistance, the BPI Summer Residency, and our renewed efforts to build a community of practice across programs. The webinar series is joined by a new… Read More
Alumni Voices: Patrick Stephens ’19
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
With First Graduates, EPI Celebrates Six Years of Transformative Education
John Yang ’23 began his studies with the Emerson Prison initiative, and now is a junior on the Boston campus. Screen shot from EPI videoFrom the very first class he took as an Emerson student, John Yang ’23 said he learned a new way… Read More
Community Voices: Dean Ansell’s remarks at Emerson Prison Initiative’s First Commencement
On September 27th the Emerson Prison Initiative held a historic celebration: the first Emerson College BA ceremony at MCI Concord and the first BA ceremony ever held at the facility. These amended remarks were given that day by Amy Ansell, Dean of the Marlboro… Read More
Community Updates: Gardening Across BPI’s Campuses
This is a summer to remember: several strings of days in the 90s and drought hitting the Hudson Valley, “severe” in many places. This, only a year after the wettest summer in the past four years. And this, during a summer full of dire… Read More
BPI Completes Fourth Annual Summer Residency
The BPI Summer Residency is a professional development opportunity that provides hands-on, experiential training in the hows, whys, and whats of BPI’s approach to college-in-prison. This July, emerging college-in-prison educators and practitioners from California, Oregon, Virginia, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Missouri, New York, and Hawai’i as well… Read More