News | College Behind Bars

BPI Alumni Announce New IWT College Behind Bars Workshop for Teachers at UFT Film Event

  BPI alumni Dyjuan Tatro and Giovannie Hernandez joined a United Federation of Teachers screening of College Behind Bars as part of UFT's Black History Month Film Series on February 27th and proudly announced to the audience of teachers that Bard College will be offering… Read More 

Bard Microcollege Logo
Event | College Behind Bars

College Behind Bars Coming to Holyoke Microcollege

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 students at chalkboard
News | College Behind Bars

PBS chronicles 12 [incarcerated students] who value education in ‘College Behind Bars’

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 

News | Alumni News

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 

Giovannie Hernandez
News | Alumni Advocacy

Op-Ed: Formerly 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 

BPI Students listening to a professor in the classroom.
News | Consortium for the Liberal Arts in Prison

Documentary Provides Rare Look at Higher Education in Prison

Emerson College launched the Emerson Prison Initiative (EPI) and joined the Consortium in 2017 with an initial cohort of twenty students at Massachusetts Correctional Institute at Concord who began coursework in the fall of 2017. With assistance from BPI, EPI is expanding course offerings… Read More 

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