Friday, November 19th at 2:30 Please join the BPI community of alumni, students, and staff for a virtual lecture and conversation about Attica 50 years later with Pulitzer-Prize-winning historian Heather Ann Thompson, author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and… Read More
BPI Blog
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BPI in Conversation – 50 Years: The Kerner Commission, Mass Incarceration & College-in-Prison
This lunchtime conversation took place on October 27th at 12pm eastern. Author and advocate Reverend Vivian Nixon; MacArthur Fellow, founder of Freedom Reads, and poet Reginald Dwayne Betts Esq; and BPI founder and executive director Max Kenner joined in a conversation moderated by historian Dr.… Read More
Learning to Code: Alumni Reflect on Their Experience in BPI’s Restart Program
BPI launched Restart in 2018 through the generous support of the National Science Foundation to build bridges between computer science training in prison and computer science entrepreneurialism after prison. Through the Restart program, BPI explored the question: "does informal learning offer an under-utilized pathway for… Read More
BPI Public Health Fellows Symposium 2021
The fifth annual BPI Public Health Fellowship Symposium featured 2021 Public Health Fellows delivering video presentations (below) of their individual projects, each of which spans a diverse array of scholarly, programmatic, and policy-based examples of work in the area of public health, followed by… Read More
Announcing the Bard Microcollege for Just Community Leadership
Bard College Launches the Nation’s First Tuition-Free College Dedicated to Advocacy, Arts, and Sciences HARLEM, N.Y. — The Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) has announced the launch of its third tuition-free microcollege, which will open in Harlem this fall. The Bard Microcollege for Just Community Leadership will… Read More
#TurnOnTheTAPNY Legislative Briefing
On February 25th BPI joined with College and Community Fellowship and colleagues in the field of college-in-prison to discuss with legislators and staffers the importance of restoring eligibility for NY's Tuition Assistance Program (TAP) to incarcerated students in New York State. Click here to… Read More
Their Stories Helped Lift a 26-Year Ban on Pell Grants for Prisoners
A college education transformed [formerly incarcerated people's] lives. But some critics fear low-quality programs will rush in. Every time Vivian D. Nixon has publicly testified about the power of a college education to transform the lives of those behind bars, she’s drawn attention to one… Read More
Five Years Since Harvard Win
This month marks the five year anniversary of the BPI Debate Union's win against Harvard in September 2015. While the team had been racking up wins since well before the Harvard match, the meet up with Harvard brought international attention to their efforts and… Read More
BPI Gardens in September
Since the spring when faculty first stopped going into the prisons in person, BPI students have received a weekly newsletter from the college informing them of important news, academic updates, writing prompts and math problems, messages from the community, and instructions on how to… Read More
BPI’s Work Continues Despite COVID-19
In March, BPI shifted our in-person work in the prisons to a distance model and in June students successfully completed the spring semester of more than 85 courses across six prisons. Although we were unable to hold commencement ceremonies in June, every student who… Read More