FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE BARD PRISON INITIATIVE ACCEPTS TRANSFER STUDENTS AND EXPANDS AS TWO COLLEGES CLOSE ANNANDALE-ON-HUSON, NY — This summer and fall, in response to two coinciding college-in-prison program closures, the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) at Bard College has undertaken an unprecedented transfer and enrollment project… Read More
BPI Blog
Content Type: Communications
Desmond Meade Will Give the Commencement Address for the 21st BPI Commencement
BPI is proud to announce Desmond Meade will give the commencement address for the 21st BPI Commencement at Eastern Correctional Facility on June 3rd, 2023, and will earn an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Bard College. 63 incarcerated Bard students have earned degrees… 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
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
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
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
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
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