by Adam Eaglin // Duke University

Dorell Smallwood is applying to college.

He would shine in any Ivy League interview. Just listen to him talk. Like a sage philosophy professor, he forms his words slowly and thoughtfully; he quotes Plato and Thomas Dewey as if it’s something every college applicant would do.

But Smallwood, who is enrolled in an associate program and applying for a bachelor’s degree, is not exactly a shoo-in for Princeton or Yale. As of next year, the 31-year-old will have spent 17 years behind bars—more of his lifetime than he’s spent as a free man.
 

 
Smallwood, who is serving 20 to life on a second-degree murder conviction, is a resident of Eastern Correctional, a maximum-security facility in Napanoch, N.Y. Behind the thick walls and armed guards of Eastern and a few other prisons in upstate New York, an intellectual experience unlike anything on normal college campuses is thriving. Murderers are debating the implications of Machiavelli’s The Prince, convicted felons are acting out August Wilson’s Fences and drug traffickers are talking through Angela Davis’ “Are Prisons Obsolete?” It’s a scene most college professors can only dream of.

Today there are about two dozen prison education programs in place across the country. Most of them are directed by or affiliated with a university, and they offer inmates the chance to apply for a select handful of slots to take college courses for credit behind bars.

Smallwood is part of the Bard Prison Initiative at Bard College, which coordinates educational programs at Eastern and three other upstate New York prison facilities. Founded in 2001, it now has an enrollment of 200 students. At Eastern, the prison administration provides Bard with space and logistical support. From there, Bard takes over, teaching the inmates as if they were any other enrolled students—creating a sort of mini-campus within the prison walls.

The number of these programs now running is drastically reduced from the early ’90s, when they flourished. Before 1994, inmates—like regular college students—were eligible to apply for Pell Grants, need-based financial aid for higher education. But following intense Republican lobbying in Congress to advance a “tough on crime” agenda, inmates lost their right to apply. Nearly 350 programs closed practically overnight. Now only a few dozen remain, surviving on private funding and volunteer efforts.

Some think the change is a good thing. Rep. Bart Gordon, D-Tenn., one of those who favored taking away prisoners’ ability to apply for Pell Grants, argued in 1994 that the benefits of funding prison education simply did not outweigh the costs. “Certainly there is an occasional success story,” he said, but if the government continues to fund Pell Grants for every prisoner who’s eligible—which is most of them—then “national priorities and taxpayers lose.” And Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson, R-Texas, who was one of the biggest proponents of ending inmates’ grant eligibility, argued in the ’90s that when Congress approved funding for Pell Grants, it was with low- and middle-income families in mind; not prisoners.

 

Even the volunteer-run programs are unsettling to some since they give those convicted of violent crimes access to classes and degrees from elite institutions that many law-abiding individuals—including some prison guards—cannot afford.

But the professors committed to educating the incarcerated stress that prisoners are more than the crimes they have committed. Pete Wetherbee, the founder of a Cornell University for-credit program at Auburn Correctional Facility in Auburn, N.Y., describes the inmates in the program as passionate readers with creative minds—people who may not have graduated from high school but now devour 300-page philosophy books in hours.

“You find it very hard to believe that some student you’ve been talking with about Shakespeare is a double murderer,” says Wetherbee, a former chair of Cornell’s English department. “You realize that these guys lead two lives.”

A double life can be a necessary part of surviving in a prison community. “Out in the yard where all these inmates congregate…they have to have a different identity, because they have to be watching their backs,” Wetherbee says. “But in the classroom, they’re just people.” That opportunity, he says, lets students behind bars appreciate education in ways that free men cannot.

Leroi Sewer, an Eastern inmate who goes by the name “Jersey,” says that even though students in the Bard program are often the butt of jokes among others on the inside, a lot of inmates would do anything to get into the classroom. “They might tease you, saying ‘don’t bring all that Bard stuff around,’ but you know they just playin’,” Sewer says. “They would really like to be in here also.”

“TREASURING EVERY MOMENT”

Napanoch, N.Y., blends into the jagged pine-tree-dusted hills of the Catskills. But this isn’t just any other small town. With a population of murderers and felons nearly the size of the town itself, Eastern Correctional Facility’s walls tower over Napanoch like a citadel.
For a semester, Tabetha Ewing, a professor of Historical Studies at Bard, came here weekly to teach classes. Although she admits to being nervous at first, Ewing says she quickly grew attached to the inmates. With them, Ewing, who continues to teach at other facilities, enjoyed “one of the most intense intellectual experiences” of her life, she says.

The selection process at prison college programs is rigorous—Max Kenner, who founded the Bard program, says that applicants number ten times as many as the number of spots available in the classroom, a selectivity rate comparable to Harvard or Yale—and Ewing says the students who ended up in her classes were top-notch.

Inmates flock to the program for a variety of reasons. For some, it’s the idea of interacting with outsiders. For others, it’s simply the chance to learn. But many inmates say that prison education provides hope that there’s a life and a future waiting for them beyond bars.

Take Sewer, a New Jersey native who ended up in prison after a drug deal gone bad. When a buyer refused to pay up, Sewer broke into his home and held him at gunpoint. Then the cops showed up. Sewer is quick to admit that what he was doing was wrong, whether he had gotten caught or not. But now, through his prison education courses, he says there’s hope that his life isn’t over.

While some students take courses just for credit, Sewer says, he participates to “apply the information later on down in life.” He won’t be up for parole until 2018, but hopes to pursue a career in marketing or advertising after his release.

Some prison classes, like Sewer’s math course, are remarkably ordinary: students listen, take notes, do homework, take quizzes. But others—especially those focusing on politics or history—bring out a sense of passion in the classroom that many professors say they find startling.

The intellectual enthusiasm Ewing found at Eastern was incredibly different from her experience in the classroom at Bard. The students at Eastern seemed to be “treasuring every moment,” she says. “From that very first day, each student gave a quality of intellectual ‘sitting-up-straight’ in the classroom.”

Michelle Smith, a Cornell graduate student of government, was similarly impressed when she taught at Auburn last spring. While her typical Cornell undergrads often have a tough time grasping the heady concepts of classic philosophers, she says, when she discussed Kant with her Auburn students, “20 hands shot up. Everyone had something to say about it.”

Professors admit there are occasional learning curves—one Auburn student told his professor halfway through the course that he had just learned to read four years ago. But they agree that inmates’ passion for learning more than makes up for those setbacks. Prisoners also bring important life experiences to the table, giving them unique insight into some of the material. While your typical political science student might read about imbalance of power or political force and then catch a movie, for these inmates, it’s a fact of life.

The feeling of intellectual fervor doesn’t end when class is over. Mary Katzenstein, a Cornell professor of government who teaches at Auburn, says one of her students kept up his studies even when he was confined to his cell for many weeks for misbehavior. He was so eager to discuss the readings that he engaged other inmates in nearby cells, discussing Václav Havel and Machiavelli over the din of the cell block. “It’s hard for me to imagine that two people can concentrate on their reading and have these kinds of discussions in a prison environment,” she says. “But it does speak to the motivation of many prison students.”

Those involved with prison education often speak of the way the information spreads beyond the classroom. Professors estimate that each book given to a student is read by at least one non-student inmate. The culture of an entire institution can change as a result: Eastern is known as being one of the quietest, safest maximum-security prisons in the state—prisoners call it “Happy Nap”—which prison officials say is a result of the small number of inmates enrolled at Bard and the big effect they have on their peers.

Kenner also emphasizes the impact that education can have beyond the prison walls. By pursuing college degrees, inmates can serve as role models for family members who might be engaged in their own struggles on the streets. More than once Kenner has heard inmates say, “‘I spoke to my son today, and he said he’s going back to school because if his father can do this in prison, then surely he can do that on the street.’”

LIFE BACK ON THE STREETS

Brian Fischer, the New York Commissioner of Corrections—the man in charge of all prisons in New York—has long been a champion for prison education programs. “We are looking at education as an investment in cutting back on crime,” he says. “And it does work.”

The statistics support Fischer’s belief. In 1995, just when hundreds of educational programs in prisons were being shut down for lack of funding, a study commissioned by the Federal Bureau of Prisons concluded that participation in prison education programs could decrease an inmate’s chances of recidivism (continuing to commit crimes after release) by more than 20 percent. In nearly all categories, prisoners with even limited educational opportunities while incarcerated were less likely to commit crimes once released.

For Mika’il DeVeaux, a research analyst and activist in New York City, reentry is much more than a numbers game. He can speak with confidence about the effect that prison education has on released inmates, and for good reason—he is one. While incarcerated for 25 years for second-degree murder at the notorious Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, N.Y., DeVeaux earned a degree from New York Theological Seminary and an M.A. in sociology from the College of New Paltz. He says that education—not just vocational training, but also a liberal arts education—opens unimagined doors for inmates. “It’s revolutionary when you begin to educate the so-called ‘underclass,’” he says. “You give people a sense of something at stake.”

DeVeaux could be the poster child for prison education’s success. In the short time since he was released in 2003, DeVeaux co-founded Citizens Against Recidivism in New York and began working as a data analyst for Philliber Research Associates, which provides evaluation and program planning for human service programs. The position sprang from connections with two of the professors he met while behind bars.

But his experience is far from typical, DeVeaux explains. Most don’t have the chance to forge relationships with professors who can help them down the road. Usually, he says, leaving prison is a jarring and terrifying experience. “A guy comes out disoriented,” DeVeaux says. “In the prison you can only walk around in circles. And then you come out, you gotta go east, west, north and south. The world is suddenly too big.”

Prison education programs, DeVeaux says, help prepare inmates for the transition. Students in prison may live in cells, but their minds retain the ability to expand. The effect of education is two-fold: not only does the opportunity provide inmates with startling intellectual stimulation, it reminds them of the world outside prison and a society that might accept them.

At a time when prisons across the country are bursting at capacity—the U.S. has more people behind bars than India, Brazil, Russia, Mexico, Iran, South Africa, Canada and Australia combined—the effect of prison education on recidivism is increasingly relevant.

 

Kenner argues that prisons have become the de facto safety net for the failure of other public institutions in the United States. When schools fail to educate properly or to provide welfare adequately, he says, the people who have been overlooked “one way or another end up in prison.”

As prison capacities increase, so does the amount of money needed to support them. In New York, the prison budget nearly doubled throughout the 1990s. During that same stretch of time, funding for higher education continued to diminish. Beginning in 1995, New York began spending more money on the prison system than on higher education—a trend that continues today.

Instead of focusing on locking people up, New York State Senator Bill Perkins says we should talk about what happens when former criminals get out. A big part of that discussion, he says, centers around the importance of education. “We have to create opportunities for those who are in prison to be able to do their time and integrate them back into society as contributing citizens,” he says. “And these programs offer that opportunity.” —with Matt Mireles and Ben Eisen

Adam Eaglin is a senior at Duke studying English and Political Science. He has a much greater appreciation for education (including his own) after writing this story.