Friends, supporters, alumni, and partners of BPI gathered for a virtual event on May 12 for an update on the wildcat strike across New York’s prisons that began on February 17, 2025. BPI executive director, Max Kenner, shared how all the events of the last few months in the prisons have impacted our work and also the opportunity that we face in this moment.
Stakes are very high for what we do now, and the decisions we make over the next several months will shape college in prison in New York for decades to come. For BPI, that means not thinking about college-in-prison programs, but college-in-prison institutions in which ambition and rigor lead to best outcomes. We have to make sure that our response to this strike is not to lessen quality or intensity, but to defend quality and intensity. What we learned when we went back into the prisons after COVID-related shutdowns and what we heard from students over and over again was that there’s no replacement for in-person learning. The persistence of these students reminds us that none of these challenges are permanent.
We obviously are facing an extraordinary and unprecedented crisis in American higher education, and what no one could have predicted is that it is incarcerated Americans who can remind us again and again of the power and unique place that college has in American life.
