Student Shawnta Montgomery spoke inspiring words at her graduation ceremony: "Inside the walls of a classroom, you escape the walls of a cell — and you become an individual again." Montgomery was graduating from the Bard Prison Initiative program, featured in the new PBS and… Read More
Press Type: Article
What Happens When Incarcerated People Get a World-Class Education?
One graduate, featured in a new PBS documentary, shares the ups and downs of earning a degree behind bars. In the fall of 2015, a maximum-security prison in New York invited Harvard’s debate team to compete against a squad of three incarcerated men. The men,… Read More
College behind bars: Education’s transformative power for America’s incarcerated men and women
By Lynn Novick Special to The Times In February 2012, my longtime producer and collaborator, Sarah Botstein, and I were invited to give a guest lecture and show scenes from our documentary, “Prohibition,” to college students taking a course on the history of social movements in America.… Read More
Incarcerated People Can Do More than Beat Harvard in a Debate
“College Behind Bars,” a new PBS documentary executive-produced by Ken Burns, shines a light on a program that every major university in America should be sponsoring By Jamil Smith When you watch College Behind Bars, which began last night on PBS and concludes tonight, or any… Read More
‘This Is a Story of Hope.’ New Documentary Series College Behind Bars Follows Men and Women Working to Gain College Degrees While in Prison
“Inside the walls of a classroom, you escape the walls of a cell — and you become an individual again.” So says Shawnta Montgomery, speaking at her graduation in the Bard Prison Initiative in College Behind Bars, the latest documentary project from Ken Burns… Read More
Review – “College Behind Bars” is a nuanced look at education in the prison industrial complex
PBS' four-hour series examines what it means to be a prisoner and a student in an effort to fix systemic injustice It’s a common nightmare for anyone who attended college: just as you’re preparing to sit down to write your undergraduate thesis, you reach for… Read More
‘College Behind Bars’: TV Review
Lynn Novick's four-hour PBS documentary about the Bard Prison Initiative and the impact of educational programs as part of prison reform is provocative and inspiring. It's rare that a week passes without some buried news story about states cutting back on prison education programs or… Read More
In College Behind Bars, Prisoners Step Into the Classroom
Rodney Spivey-Jones looked up at his face on the TV screen bolted high on the wall, but his attention was on the men around him. Garbed in green sweatshirts and canvas pants, they sat in seven rows of folding chairs in an otherwise vacant… Read More
PBS chronicles 12 inmates who value education in ‘College Behind Bars’
The film fills the screen with stories about human transformation as cameras follow a dozen incarcerated men and women as they try to earn college degrees. Jule Hall was 17 when he went to prison for being an accessory to homicide. For 11 years, he… Read More
PBS’s ‘College Behind Bars’ offers a lasting lesson: Learning is its own kind of freedom
Review Should prisoners get the chance to take college courses while serving time? Seems like a fine idea to me, but my heart tends to be big on these kinds of issues. Americans, in general, have frowned on it: The sweeping Violent Crime Control and Law… Read More