BPI Blog

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.

Bard Prison Initiative students conjugate Spanish verbs at Eastern Correctional Facility. (Skiff Mountain Films)

Jule Hall was 17 when he went to prison for being an accessory to homicide. For 11 years, he worked to be a perfect prisoner, broke no official rules or inmate codes, and focused on getting out. Then, he enrolled in the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI), a program of Bard College offering higher education to people incarcerated in six New York state prisons.

Hall recalls hearing a school administrator say, “‘From this point on, you should not look at yourself as a prisoner in this institution but as a student in a bigger institution.’ I thought he was crazy.”

But miraculously through education, Hall did begin to see himself and other inmates differently.

“There were guys in the Bard program with me that I would not have talked to, but seeing them in that (educational) environment started a process of me reinventing my identity,” he said.

Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) students in a literature seminar at Taconic Correctional Facility. (Skiff Mountain Films)

Hall was charged in the 1993 killing of a mother who was stuck by a bullet while Hall and another teen were involved in a gun battle in the Brownsville section of New York. Hall served his time at the Eastern Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison in southeast New York. He was released early in 2015.

Now free, Hall, 44, who is a program associate for the Ford Foundation in New York City, is one of the people featured in the powerful new documentary series, “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 through BPI.

The four-part series premieres on PBS over two nights — Nov. 25 & 26. Like most people, Emmy-winning filmmaker Lynn Novick had not been inside a prison before she began lecturing and teaching at the Eastern Correctional Maximum Facility for men in New York State.

“I had a fundamental shift in what I think about incarceration,” she said.

One compelling storyline is the preparation of students on the Bard debate team and ultimately the team’s win over Harvard University debate team, a dramatic moment captured by media around the world.

For most prisoners, there is no access to a college program or a way to pay for tuition to take classes. There is currently only a pilot program introduced by President Barack Obama’s Education Department, involving 10,000 inmates across 64 institutions.

But new bipartisan legislation could take this program out of the pilot phase and reverse the more than two-decade-old ban on inmates using Pell grants, set by Congress and President Bill Clinton in 1994.

Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) students at Eastern New York Correctional Facility in an advanced bachelor’s degree seminar. (Skiff Mountain Films)

“There are millions of people in our country who are basically left out of the job market because they do not have the prerequisite skills. Restoring Pell grants to people who are incarcerated will equip them with the knowledge to meet requirements for jobs that exist,” said Rep. Danny K. Davis, D-Ill., a sponsor of the bill that will make the grants again accessible to inmates.

The United States has over two million people incarcerated and the documentary notes that about 630,000 people are released each year.

According to the Vera Institute for Justice, which has studied the current college pilot programs, access to higher education in prisons reduces recidivism by providing people with resources to be successful and strengthens families by helping formerly incarcerated people become economically stable.

Salih Israil appears in “College Behind Bars” as an adviser to students but he is also a graduate of the Bard program. Israil, 44, a software engineer in New York City, entered prison at the age of 23 as a drug dealer and served 20 years for robbery, assault and possession of a weapon..

When he entered prison in 1998, the “get tough on crime” legislation had halted college programs. But every man who had been able to attend college before the programs stopped advised Israil to apply if he ever got the opportunity.

“It was known that the people who went to college don’t come back,” Israil said, adding that many inmates experienced the changes and self growth that occurs when you receive a good education.

“I discovered I had ideas about things that I never knew I had,” he said. “I was shy. But I read books and had discussions with others. Inherent in that, I became a social person.”

Both Hall and Israil are optimistic about the impact the documentary series will have on viewers.

“I would hope the viewer sees the effort many people put into personal transformation and the role of education in personal transformation,” Hall said.

“We reduce people to what they have done,” Israil said. “I think what this film does is remind us that human beings are capable of changing over time.”

“College Behind Bar” premieres Nov. 25 and 26, 2019, 9:00-11:00 p.m. ET on PBS

Review

Bard Prison Initiative students conjugate Spanish verbs at Eastern Correctional Facility. (Skiff Mountain Films)

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 Enforcement Act, which became law in 1994, stripped federal funding for many such programs, which vanished as prisons grew increasingly crowded and corporately ­managed.

For years, politicians have successfully argued that taxpayer dollars shouldn’t help convicted criminals earn degrees — especially if other law-abiding citizens aren’t able to afford college. That logic leads to further inequity, in which working- and middle-class people on the outside can go to college so long as they can shoulder a lifetime of debt. It’s a kind of prison sentence either way.

In PBS’s “College Behind Bars,” an inspiring, four-part documentary from Lynn Novick (“The Vietnam War”) that airs Monday and Tuesday, viewers are taken inside the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI), which offers a rare opportunity for select inmates in New York’s state prison system to enroll in the same rigorous curriculum taught by the same professors at Bard College’s idyllic Dutchess County campus, where tuition alone runs $55,566 per year.

Of the state’s 51,000 male inmates and 2,400 female inmates, only 300 get to participate in Bard’s program, which is paid for by the college, largely through private donations — a salient detail that I hope will calm the irritable tax cranks long enough to consider BPI’s extraordinary successes. Of its graduates, recidivism (the number of inmates who return to prison after parole) is down to 4 percent, compared with a 50 percent rate overall.

Yet, as we see in the film (which is executive-produced by Ken Burns and produced by Sarah Botstein), there’s a simmering resentment against these students — starting with the scorn from corrections officers, none of whom could or would participate in the film (and thus have their faces blurred). As a prison official notes, many of these guards might have liked to go to college themselves, but never got the chance. It can be galling to watch a group of inmates spend part of their days debating gene therapy in a philosophy class, or parsing “King Lear” in English lit, or brushing up on their intermediate Chinese.

Some limelight came for Bard’s student inmates in 2015, when their debate team beat Harvard’s — news that went viral. It got people interested again in the broader benefits of such a program. As one of the inmates in the program points out, it’s called the department of corrections. What’s more corrective than learning?

Their lives as students are far from ideal or cushy. The inmates note their past failures in the classroom and in life (many are in for murder or manslaughter). Those who grew up in and around New York City attended some of the system’s worst public schools, in communities that discouraged them from pursuing good grades. They enter the Bard program still struggling to write a cohesive paragraph or make sense of the first page of a reading assignment, “doing their best to be brave in the face of probably some of the hardest material they’ve ever encountered,” says literature professor Christina Mengert.

Ever wondered whether a prison sentence might, at least, be the place you finally finish reading “Moby-Dick”? Well, rest uneasy, because the environment is hardly conducive: At the Eastern Correctional Facility, a maximum-security men’s prison, classes and studying are frequently interrupted by mandatory population counts — as many as five per day. The students must protectively hoard their books and learning materials in cramped cells (sometimes just a cubicle with a bed) and can use computers only to type papers, because the Internet is off-limits.

Still, serious scholarship gives them a sense of identity they’d never had before; as Novick’s camera reveals over time, the knowledge they acquire makes them stronger, fuller people and engaged citizens. Indeed, they become even more remorseful about their crimes, with increased empathy for other people and a greater understanding of the human condition. One inmate, John Gonzalez, is astonished to finally “put words to things” he knew all along: “Hegemony. Alienation,” he says.

Novick’s patience is rewarded with the chance to chronicle some outcomes, a couple of which are a bit tragic. Inmates who commit infractions lose their Bard spots; they can spend years trying to get back into the program. Others have futures that turn out more happily than a viewer might guess, including gainful employment after parole.

It’s especially fascinating to watch two students in particular — Rodney Spivey-Jones and ­Sebastian Yoon — as they shape their complicated senior theses into works that impress a committee of their professors, who praise both for their intellectual discipline and insights.

Perhaps this is what so aggravates opponents of the idea: the sight of these men overachieving and the personal freedom that knowledge bestows. Even within a cell, Yoon observes, he can read Kierkegaard and experience a form of liberation — something beyond the walls, beyond himself.

College Behind Bars (two hours) begins Monday at 9 p.m. with Parts 1 and 2 on WETA and MPT. Parts 3 and 4 air Tuesday. For streaming, visit pbs.org.

Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) students conjugate Spanish verbs at Eastern New York Correctional Facility. SKIFF MOUNTAIN FILMS

For nearly 20 years, a program run by Bard College has given hundreds of prisoners in New York State access to a college education. The Bard Prison Initiative gives people a chance to take the same courses offered at Bard’s main campus, and finish the program with the same degrees, all expenses paid. Now, the new documentary series College Behind Bars follows several students as they manage classes and homework amid life in prison.

Directed by Lynn Novick and produced by her longtime collaborator, Ken Burns, the series provides a rare look at prison life, and how the rigor and structure of education can help people survive their time there and thrive once they get out.

College enrollment in United States prison facilities expanded after the Higher Education Act was passed in 1965, as inmates became eligible for federal grants if they could not pay for classes on their own. But that all but disappeared in the mid-’90s, after the federal Crime Bill barred incarcerated people from receiving any federal funding for education. Since then, the handful of programs currently operating, including BPI, must rely on private donations to provide college courses to a tiny fraction of people in the prison system.

“College education was commonplace, part of the idea of what prison was for. And pretty much overnight, when that federal funding was removed almost all the programs just stopped operating,” said Novick. “They went from about 800 programs to fewer than 10.”

Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) students in a literature seminar at Taconic Correctional Facility. SKIFF MOUNTAIN FILMS

College Behind Bars follows two groups of BPI students: men held at Eastern Correctional Facility in Napanoch, NY, and women at the Taconic Correctional Facility in Westchester County. For Dyjuan Tatro, and most of the incarcerated students featured in the series, this was the first time they had ever considered higher education as an option.

“For me, the opportunity to go to college was a way to do something productive with my time in prison, but even more importantly, to prepare myself to re-enter society,” said Tatro.

Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) graduates celebrate at Taconic Correctional Facility in June, 2017. SKIFF MOUNTAIN FILMS

The documentary has its share of heartwarming moments, like when the BPI debate team manages to defeat Harvard University’s in a triumph fit for a sports movie. But it also highlights tensions around the program—early on, one student notes that many of the prison guards do not have college degrees themselves; and while another incarcerated student was thankful to get the opportunity to take college courses in prison, her mother expresses frustration that she had to pay for her other children to get their degrees.

“I think she’s frustrated with the high cost of education and lack of access, and it’s unconscionable how much ordinary people have to pay for higher education, so that lack of access doesn’t feel fair,” said Novick.

College Behind Bars premieres on PBS on Monday, Nov. 25 at 9 p.m. EST.

NAPANOCH, NY – APRIL 19: The Bard Prison debate reacts to defeating the Cambridge University debate team at Eastern Correctional Facility. Cambridge University, is the world’s top ranked debate team. Cambridge was invited to come to the prison and compete against the the Bard Prison Initiative. (Michael Noble, Jr. for The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Anyone looking for something to watch over the Thanksgiving Holidays would do well to check out the inspiring and fascinating “College Behind Bars,” airing on PBS stations on November 25th. An extended trailer can be viewed here. The show focuses on one particular college-in-prison program, the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI).

BPI is part of Bard College, a small, private university in New York State. It enrolls just over 300 students, all of them serving time inside six different New York State prisons.

The show is four hours long, but the stories of individual prisoners and the program as a whole are gripping. One of the most interesting things about BPI is the very high level of the college courses taught there. Rather than remedial instruction, the students are learning about The Brothers Karamazov and high-level mathematics.

Twenty students at a time also learn to debate. And they learn to debate well. The BPI debate team regularly challenges teams from the best colleges in the world. They have beaten the likes of Harvard, Cambridge, and The University of Pennsylvania, debating issues such as undocumented immigration, the desirability of high-speed rail, and abolishing the electoral college. In fact, the only teams to ever beaten the BPI team, which has a 10-2 record, are Brown University and West Point (and the BPI team won three subsequent re-matches with West Point.)

The students at BPI are not generally low-level offenders who wound up in prison through bad luck. These are mostly men and women who committed serious crimes and are serving long sentences. These are folks who under normal circumstances would be highly likely to end up back in prison after their release. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, over two-thirds (67.8 percent) of released prisoners were rearrested within three years of release and over three quarters (76.6 percent) were rearrested within five years. The statistics for BPI graduates are much, much better. 97.5% of them never go back to prison.

It is natural that some object to college prison programs because people who did bad things are getting a free education while so many law-abiding citizens cannot afford to go to college. But such thinking is short-sighted. According to The Wall Street Journal “The average annual cost for each person in a New York prison is $69,000, by state data, and . . . The Bard Prison Initiative says its college program costs about $9,000 for each student yearly.” In other words, a successful prison college program saves taxpayers an enormous amount of money. This is money that could be used to expand college access for everybody.

Of course, there is the question of whether programs such as BPI can be scaled up to make any sort of real dent in the recidivism rate or the role that released prisoners can play in society. As noted, BPI enrolls 300 students at a time, but over 10,000 ex-prisoners are released from America’s state and federal prisons every week. Most of BPI’s students entered prison when they were still minors, so they hardly entered the college program with a strong educational background. And many prisoners suffer from serious mental illnesses that would make giving them a high-quality college education extremely difficult.

So can the BPI program be scaled up to meaningful numbers? I had the opportunity to speak with two BPI graduates about these concerns. They were both articulate men with professional demeanors. They were both adamant that they are not outliers and that BPI-type programs can elevate the great majority of prisoners. One said, “I am not an exceptional person. I’m a person who was given an exceptional opportunity.”

So how does BPI do it? There seem to be several answers. One is high standards. The documentary shows very high levels of class discussion and students talk about their intense efforts, sometimes spending hours on a single page of reading. Another is respect. One student effused that “They didn’t treat us as problems to be fixed.”

Another key is optimism. Hope is doubtless something in short supply. BPI tapped in prisoner’s need for that. As one said, “Inmates are longing for hope and hope materialized in the form of education.” Also important are the role models that the professors teaching these course provide. As one graduate put it, “Our interactions with the professors modeled our interactions with our future bosses.”

America is having a healthy discussion about mass incarceration, but much of the rhetoric is steeped in wishful thinking. Listening to some politicians and activists, one would think that our prisons are mostly filled with non-violent prisoners serving long sentences for little more than smoking a joint. On the contrary, while there are plenty of drug dealers in prison, most people in state prisons are serving time for crimes such as murder, rape, assault, robbery, manslaughter, and burglary. If this country is going to be serious about reducing the number of incarcerated people, it must be serious about reducing the recidivism rate for people who have committed major, often violent crimes. They deserve to serve time, but they also deserve a chance to redeem themselves. BPI and similar initiatives show a way forward.