BPI alumni Jule Hall and Salih Israil, who are featured in College Behind Bars, spoke with Patrice Gaines along with the film’s director, Lynn Novick. This article, reproduced below, first appeared in NBC News. The film fills the screen with stories about human transformation as… Read More
BPI Blog
Tag: Alumni
The Right to Learn Behind Bars: Encouraging College in Prison Reduces Recidivism and Helps Society
BPI alumnus Dyjuan Tatro ’18, government affairs officer for the Bard Prison Initiative, recently penned an op-ed on the value of investing pubic funds in college in prison. This article, reproduced below, first appeared in the New York Daily News. Read the full article below: The… Read More
Vulture: In College Behind Bars, Prisoners Step Into the Classroom
Ted Alcorn writes about BPI Alumnus Rodney Spivey-Jones’s ('17) unique experience of watching himself in a screening of the documentary film College Behind Bars, behind bars. The article, reproduced below, first appeared in Vulture, from New York Magazine. From the article: Spivey-Jones had already seen earlier… 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
‘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