Friday, March 20, 2020 1:30-3:30 p.m. Holyoke Library Community Room 250 Chestnut Street, Holyoke Please join us for a screening of highlights from the documentary film COLLEGE BEHIND BARS, about students in the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI), one of the most rigorous prison education programs in America. The screening… Read More
BPI Blog
Tag: Bard College
BETTER ANGELS PODCAST Max Kenner: how prison education gives hope
BPI's Executive Director Max Kenner sat down with Sarah Brown on the Better Angels Podcast, originally posted on Their World and reproduced below. “I think you’re exactly right that mass incarceration is a symptom, if not the most prominent system of structural racism in the… 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