Education Has No Bias

There was a lot that struck me and really made me feel emotional throughout this docuseries. The prisoners that are observed, most of them serving close to 20 years for a crime they committed as a minor, are given the education of a college student which they understand to be a “privileged education” and many on the outside oppose, who think that as non-offenders, they have worked too hard to reward criminals for a free education. Many individuals said that they might as well commit crime in order to get an education. However, as addressed by the students at Bard, this is not the case. They were arrested for a mistake and were lucky to have the opportunity to change their lives and mindset and worked hard through their context of prison lines, rowdiness, and rigor of the officers. However, this education provides an oasis for prisoners in a sense they’ve never been able to experience before. One of the prisoners said that it was amazing to be able to put the, “words to systems you’ve known your entire life but you’ve never had the word for it.” Conventional learning, especially for those raised in poor neighborhoods(which was the reality of most prisoners), trained them to praise the history of their country and follow the crowd rather than understand and criticize society and its laws. These students have never been challenged to do more or think more of what they were told. However, college education has helped them become civic beings, understanding that they are a part of a community and it is a part of them rather than the community being against them. Dyjuan, a fellow student, said ”professors begin teaching you how smart you are.” This relates back to my last critical reflection in the sense that conventional learning does drive or challenge one’s intellectual ability and especially when one is in the context that lacks support, resources, and motivation, people tend to give up on education. While these were underlying problems among all the students, I really enjoyed each individual’s story no matter how much or how little they revealed about themselves. Rodney Spivey-Jones, lost his mother at a young age from mental illness and soon her own suicide. And even in the care of his grandparents, their deaths soon followed his mother’s. He said he was not ready to be alone and though he kept his promise to his mother to graduate high school, life didn’t get any simpler. Though he was in college and was working multiple jobs, he needed more money to take care of himself by robbing. At 19, it went wrong and he killed a man, the father of a young woman. Another student, Sebastian Yoon, had a significant story for me. His mother left when he was young and his father in America, sent him and his siblings to live in Korea with grandparents. His father slept in a car to save money, working over 12 hour days. Yoon is serving a 15 year sentence for manslaughter after a fight turned deadly. His father blames himself the most for feeling like he neglected his son and allowed him to associate with the wrong crowd of people. When he was first incarcerated at the age of 16, he imagined coming out of prison as an old man with nothing and wanted to kill himself, but couldn’t do it because of his father. He knew he had to find a reason to live. He also speaks to the Asian-American experience in prison and how many don’t have any familial support because they are seen to have dishonored their family. I think for those specific students, I really grasped onto their stories throughout the series.

I really enjoyed our conversation with Ke and Miguel and it helped the situation become more personal and humanizing. A key similarity between our conversation and the docuseries was the concept of survival and what you do to survive which has led people to misjudge their actions and end up in prison. Jule Hall, a student who graduated and became a tutor at Bard, remembered his childhood to be a tense, violent one and began the cycle of “don’t think, just act.” Giovannie Hernandez also talked about a violent childhood and how he had to basically stop his life to defend himself, “When everyone around you is a criminal you join to become a part of that society, there is no concept of citizenry and responsibility.” Shawnta, a student from the women’s prison, spoke about how women in her community got pregnant, so that’s what she did and she followed the trend of having children and being taken care of by a man. She moved in with a man who initially gave her attention, but soon began abusing her regularly even when she became pregnant once again. She wanted to leave him, but he threatened to kill her family if she left. She later found her two year old daughter knocked unconsciousness and brought her to the hospital where she died. Prosecutors questioned Shawnta, telling her how her daughter died from a hit that lacerated her liver. She confessed to a crime she did not commit because she felt responsible for keeping her daughter in a dangerous situation, though her boyfriend was not charged. She let her son, who she was pregnant with at the time, be adopted because she wanted him to live a better life. While these hopeless and jarring situations cornered them into their crimes, they said that these programs are necessary. With the absence of growth programs, individuals become disillusioned in prison because they haven’t been prepared for life other than the past of their crimes. In prison, they sit and lose hope, becoming disconnected by how lonely prison can be. I really enjoyed Elias’s story of how he was using his own experience to steer his nephew in the right direction when he started losing grip of his education. He challenged him to stay in bathtub with a few books as that had been his life for the past 26 years, and his nephew ended up redirecting life and going to college.

The Voice of the Experienced organization was very interesting to me. Their mission is to restore “the full human and civil rights of those most impacted by the criminal (in)justice system. Together we have the experiences, expertise and power to improve public safety in Louisiana and beyond without relying on mass incarceration.” While I did read about and found grand importance that helps inmates when they get out and help them find housing and a job, I think that this specific organization is important because it looks at the root of the issue so no one else has to go through the process of being disadvantaged by the system, put into prison, maybe find a program to help rehabilitate them, then hopefully get on parole. I think that this is the clog to stop the prisoners from flowing into these money hungry prisons that provide no services to those incarcerated because a “ violent criminal” is not worthy of redemption, that it is not the act, but their inherent trait that must be punished and pushed away from society. The organization gets the stories of those formerly incarcerated out there and work on reform to end mass incarceration.