Critical Reflection # 9 — Behind Bars
This documentary, College Behind Bars, was truly moving and inspiring. In the state of New York, there are about 51,000 men and 2,4000 women who are incarcerated. Only 950 of them have access to higher education, and 300 of them are trying to get a college education. Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) is a program that allows prisons to get an associate's degree. Six prisons offer the BPI program, 5 for men and 1 for women. Each summer, there are about 400 applicants, and each prison admits 20 students.
“Prison is a place where you can lose hope” but through the BPI program, many prisoners have found a new sense of hope and freedom. What amazed me the most in this documentary, was how committed and dedicated some people were to get an education. Many of the students were high school dropouts and didn’t take school seriously when they were younger. One man expressed how difficult it was for him to complete the readings or assignments when he first started BPI. It would take him 2–3 hours to get through reading 2 pages. He could’ve easily given up, but instead, he pushed through it. I thought it was incredible to see how much these students were able to learn and grow as individuals; going from a lack of education and making poor choices that got them into prison to changing their lives around by getting a proper college education. BPI helps prisoners become civic beings and allows them to have an interest in their communities — their community is apart of them and they are apart of their community. Many people of the outside argued that prisoners don’t deserve to have access to the luxuries of education and they don’t want their tax dollars to fund these programs. However, programs like BPI are what change these individuals to be productive, educated beings. “When you have an absence of any programs in prison that facilitate any kind of grow, individuals are becoming disillusioned because they are not being prepared for anything other than what they have already been doing, which is crime.”
One student spoke about when he reads in his cell and gets in the zone, the walls start to dissipate and he feels free. To him, it’s not just about getting a degree, it’s about changing fundamentally the way he thinks, behaves, and interacts with people. School is a way for these prisoners to occupy their time, and keep their minds off of the harsh prison environment. I think for the students that I worked with at Bayside MLK Academy, the school can also be a place for them to get their minds off of other stressors that they may be dealing with at home like poverty. Education can help positively change their lives too. However, some schools may not provide children with the proper education to succeed in the future. One prisoner in the documentary said as an adult looking back, he feels like he was cheated by his previous childhood education because it wasn’t challenging enough. His community and environment didn’t engage him in school and he ended up dropping out and getting involved with crime. He enjoyed school as a kid and wanted to go to college, but the rest of his classmates didn’t have the same desire. He didn’t want to feel like an outcast so he followed his community’s norm of not going to school. This makes me question whether or not our public schools are challenging students enough. For me personally, elementary school to high school felt like a breeze. I never really had to study that much for tests and I never really felt challenged. I even took AP classes, but at my high school, it was the norm to take AP classes. The regular classes were for people who didn’t try or do their work. As children, we don’t really have the power to choose the community we grow up in or the schools that we attend. Bayside MLK lacks the resources to provide students with a better education. They don’t have the proper staff and many of their extracurricular classes had to be cut.
What I learned from this documentary, along with the stories from Miguel and Ke, is that prisoners are able to change their lives around and be successful after being released from prison. I have always kind of had this idea in my mind that all prisoners are bad and that they will always be bad. I am guilty of thinking and labeling prisoners just by their crimes. But now I know that sometimes crimes are inevitable. Some people may just have been trying to defend themselves and had no other option but to resort to crime. Many people grow up in communities that influence them to drop out of school and get involved in gangs or crime. Their communities limit their success. Racism also plays a huge role in mass incarceration and it is hard for individuals of color to avoid. Education has proven to help prisoners become civic beings in the world. Miguel, Ke, and the personal stories in the documentary have changed my perspective on prisoners and opened my mind to the potential that some prisoners have. Prisoners who get an education behind bars put in so much hard work and show lots of dedication. It almost seems like it would be harder in some ways to get an education being bars than in the normal setting because they don’t have the same previous education, and they have to deal with the horrible prison environment. They also don’t have access to technology or the same resources, yet they are doing the same work as other colleges. Miguel and Ke’s current motivations in social justice for prisoners is really inspiring. They had other jobs lined up for them, but instead, they chose to go back and help prisoners.
I explored the organization Re:Store Justice which was founded in 2017 inside the San Quentin State Prison by Adnan Khan, Alexandra Malick, and Sara Sindija. It was created to reform our justice system — from how to respond to violence, how to heal once harm has been inflicted, to devise policies that deal with them appropriately and to create media to combat misinformation. It started with organizing symposia inside the prison for survivors of violence and current prisoners to talk in small circles about their experiences and create healing. They offer survivor support, restorative justice, do advocacy/policy work, and created a media project called FirstWatch. To support survivors, they collaborate with community organizations, government victim advocates, and incarcerated people to identify system reforms and community resources to address needs and ways of healing. That address that much of the violence in our society is due to the systemic oppression and intergenerational trauma. Restorative justice tries to heal individuals, as well as communities and transform our justice system. They organize symposia, train affected individuals and advocates, facilitate individual face to face dialogues, provide community days of healing for survivors and responsible parties, build and strengthen key relationships, provide opportunities for equitable dialogue, encourage accountability, and engage stakeholders to be directly involved in the process of responding to harm. Re:Store Justice fights to advance evidence-based and trauma-informed policies rooted in improving public safety to create healthier communities and protect vulnerable populations. The FirstWatch media project highlights personal narratives from those in prison and shows their transformative work inside prison. Their goal is to humanize incarceration and to show that accountability and rehabilitation can create healing.
