“As Ambitious As Possible”: The BPI Consortium for the Liberal Arts in Prison Puts College for Incarcerated People on the Global Agenda

“We spent 26 years arguing so there would be college in prison and now the argument is what will it be?” says Max Kenner, Executive Director of the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) and leader of BPI’s Consortium for the Liberal Arts in Prison, an OSUN-supported project.

BPI was launched in 1999 by Kenner and other Bard College Annandale undergraduates, including BPI’s Director of National Engagement, Jessica Neptune, who considered mass incarceration to be their generation’s most critical social justice issue. Since then, BPI has gone on to become one of the most widely recognized college-in-prison programs in the US, filling a formidable gap and enrolling annually over 300 incarcerated students across New York State in programs that culminate in degrees from Bard College. 

In 2009, BPI established the Consortium for the Liberal Arts in Prison with support from the Open Society Foundations (OSF) to facilitate the development of new college-in-prison programs across the US. Since 2021, BPI has partnered with OSUN to bolster its existing US programs and also support the growth and expansion of university-in-prison partnerships with educators across the globe. 

“From the beginning, we have been interested in restoring college-in-prison generally where there was none,” says Neptune. “We had a commitment to working to see that college-in-prison is as ambitious as possible…(and) as broad and as close to resembling the best of higher education anywhere across the landscape.”

Restoring Funding for Education in Prison

For most of its history, BPI was focused primarily on undoing some of the damage done to education in US prisons by legislation passed in 1994, when a federal anti-crime law eliminated Pell Grants for incarcerated people, leading to the shuttering of most prison education programs across the US. Thanks to the longstanding and uncompromising efforts of BPI and many other hardworking advocates, Pell Grants for incarcerated individuals were restored in 2020.

BPI has also made progress in efforts to offer “time cuts” for incarcerated students in New York State who participate in college-in-prison programs. In the past, some types of convictions were not eligible for receiving such cuts to their sentences, disproportionately impacting women. Now, through the leadership of BPI’s Senior Government Affairs Officer and alumnus, Dyjuan Tatro, BPI successfully spearheaded new legislation that grants six-month reprieves for more people in prison who earn a college degree. 

Grants and Guidance Ensuring Sustainability

Since 2019, BPI has expanded efforts to support the growing field of college-in-prison through ongoing technical assistance and the development of the BPI Summer Residency, now in its fifth year. This support includes assisting with program design and implementation and giving critical guidance on strategy and sustainability so federal funds can be used as effectively as possible, says Neptune. 

In the last year, the Consortium also provided capacity-building grants to 8 domestic and 12 international partner institutions to boost local practitioners’ ability to grow and sustain educational programs tailored to their specific needs. The grants supported technical investments in computer technology and hardware, launching STEM curricula, building out reentry support systems, and deepening communications and fundraising capacity for long term sustainability.

Diversifying Revenue Streams

Other critical ways the Consortium works to ensure programs’ longevity and stability is by advising them to seek out varied sources of funding beyond federal grants and by helping them to connect to such funding whenever possible, says Neptune. “We strive to create multiple revenue streams so we have a program that is built to last,” she says. Neptune and Kenner agree that collaborating with OSUN (and earlier, OSF) has played a key role in expanding their institutional partners’ funding sources to foundations and the private sector. 

Growing a Network of Practitioners

While the politics around public funding for education in prison in the US has shifted in the past ten years, circumstances vary greatly by country in the international context, says Neptune. A new program was recently established in Jamaica, while an existing program in South Africa was significantly elevated by OSUN support. Argentina is a country with a long history of education in prison, while partners in countries such as Brazil, Mexico, and Austria are just now exploring the development of university programs in their contexts.

The Consortium is also growing a larger community-of-practice (COP) that endeavors to bring a diverse range of practitioners together. The COP has invited educators to join from across 6 continents and 14 nations, including Argentina, South Africa, Brazil, Jamaica, Trinidad, Australia, Italy, Mexico, Tanzania, and the United Kingdom. The COP gives community partners a platform to share knowledge and experiences through in-person and virtual convenings. Over the years, some members of the COP have attended the BPI Summer Residency at Bard College and in 2023 the University of San Martin CUSAM in Buenos Aires hosted a unique global convening of education-in-prison practitioners, with support from BPI and the Consortium. 

Much like the OSUN model, these networked efforts are key for developing a diverse community of institutions learning from each other and sharing resources and strategy to build the most effective university-in-prison collaborations.

“The international work we do is exclusively possible due to OSUN,” says Kenner. “For at least 40 years, the US has been aggressively exporting the worst criminal justice policy––now we are slowly backing away from that. …Here is something the US has done better than others and is something unique we can export to others. This can only happen because of OSUN.”

Post Date: 06-30-2023