Thoughts on Education Part 1

By Mwandishi Mitchell

On June 13, 2013, I had the honor and privilege to attend a lecture given by Thomas M. Arvanities of Villanova University. He is the current director of Villanova studies here at Graterford. His lecture was devoted to Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow.

The lecture was held for Villanova alumni who participated in the free Bachelor of Arts degree here at Graterford. Because my success as a writer has gotten around the institution, I was invited to attend as a guest.

The institution here at Graterford is thirty-one miles west of Philadelphia, in Graterford, Pennsylvania. It opened officially in 1929 and to date is the largest maximum-security prison in the state.

Just thirty years ago, Pennsylvania prisons housed about 5,000 inmates in seven prisons across the state. Things have changed since 1983, as the bloated prisons have ballooned to four times as many with twenty-nine. The prison population is ten times as many as more than 50,000 inmates are held in state facilities. Talk about mass incarceration!

Despite these statistics, though, in 1972 a remarkable thing happened. James J. McKenna, a former sociology professor and Villanova’s undergraduate director, started allotting degrees for prisoners at Graterford. Within the past eight years, sixteen professors, adjuncts, graduate students, and undergraduate students have volunteered their services to help inmates get degrees.

I can assume my fellow comrades who have received degrees from Villanova feel empowered despite the fact that many of them have Life sentences. Proud too, at knowing that even though society has caste them into a lot of demonization, they have done something productive with their lives. Even now, in my mind, I can see the proud smiling faces of family members as a peer of mine walks up to the director donned in Villanova graduation apparel to receive his degree. Such a marvelous sight indeed!

However, the program here at the prison was once on the verge of termination. Under President Clinton, in the early ’90’s, Pell Grant eligibility for prisoners was done away with. Without this funding, many other colleges and universities that offered degrees to inmates pulled out. Villanova kept their promise to inmates; they did not pull out.

Professor McKenna was succeeded by Stanly Jacobs, an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice. “Villanova made a vow, and we plan to honor our commitment,” Jacobs reiterated when asked why Villanova chose to stay at Graterford without Federal funding. Villanova is the only university to offer a degree program at Graterford for all qualified prisoners.

Two courses are funded and taught by Villanova each semester, and volunteers teach additional courses. I had the honor of attending a Creative Writing Workshop, a small class of about ten to twelve students, which was taught by Villanova English professor, Dr. Lisa Sewell. Being in a classroom atmosphere again had me reminiscing about my community college days, long before I was imprisoned. I was grateful for the opportunity to be able to show my talent to Dr. Sewell, and learn how to make my writing better. It was such a wonderful experience that I’m going to try to enroll in this coming fall semester. The only thing that worries me is the part of the pre-application that asks: Number of Class l misconducts (within the last four years?) I wonder if eight is too many? Well, at least in five of the eight I was found not guilty and the charges were dismissed.

Because the program is offered from Villanova’s part-time studies, it normally takes ten to twelve years to earn a degree in Bachelor of Arts. Grades are allotted the same way that they are at the main campus of the university: GPAs are based on a 4.0 scale. Professors and volunteers don’t look at Graterford as a penitentiary when they come to teach inmates. They look at Graterford as an off campus satellite of the main campus in suburban Philadelphia. The inmates love the interaction with professors and students. Besides that, they’re happy. Inmates enrolled in the Villanova program show better behavior, and educate other prisoners who are not enrolled.

The Villanova program here at Graterford is a godsend. Education is the key to making it out of poverty and out of the filled ghettos. By acquiring knowledge, a person is able to live productively without falling into the lure of street hustling, a drug game in which two things are certain to befall them: prison and death. By getting an education people on the outside will see the best in them, and realize that yes, they do matter.

The program has fifty active students currently, which is forty less than in 2010, when ninety students were enrolled. No one is quite sure of why enrollment has dropped as low as it has. I pray by that statistic there is no writing on the wall to read. When the time comes, I hope they accept me into the Villanova Bachelor of Arts program. I want the chance to make the best out of a bad situation.

I will never be able to repay Ms. Buffet and The Sunshine Ladies. She does this – gives it all away – I think, because she believes in a basic goodness inside us that can be cultivated given the right tools. She believes that we can change the direct course of our lives if given a chance. I’ve seen first-hand the effect this opportunity has on people – how it’s completely altered the quality of their lives by giving them purpose and worth. It has certainly done so for me. I’m often asked how I plan to give back – or pay it forward. I think the answer to that is more complicated than a few short sentences, but I will say it starts with sharing what I’ve learned about myself. It starts with shedding light –sunshine- on what’s inside and perhaps reminding someone that they are more than just seven digits.

By Jeff Conner

Prison is by default a wallow in waste. To avoid depression and stagnation, I participate in the University Beyond Bars, a cash-strapped non-profit program that provides college classes to prisoners. I take classes (whether they’re for credit or not) to develop my intellectual capacities and to improve my chance of success upon getting out of prison.

Before the University Beyond Bars existed, I had taken correspondence courses for many years, paying for them through my G.I. Bill money. Each time, I had to pay extension fees, since I didn’t have sufficient self-discipline to meet the initial deadlines in the courses. Although I found I could be successful, the experience was dissatisfying: it was difficult to study in a vacuum, without the salutary peer pressure to complete and compete and in the absence of any opportunity to be guided by faculty.

By contrast, the University Beyond Bars (UBB) feels like a momentary respite from prison. When I enter the classroom for English 3230 (American Literature: 1918 to Present), I receive something that studying alone could never give me, courtesy of Gillian Harkins, an award-winning professor who is director of Undergraduate Programs in English at the University of Washington and the chair of UBB’s Education Advisory Committee–and a charismatic intellectual with a style all her own, who loves Walter Benjamin, Henry James, and Zoolander with apparently equal verve, to boot. She teaches us historicized close reading as an ethical practice: a means of care and attention that makes of literature both the most necessary and searching criticism of society and self. The qualities of precision, insight, and sensitivity that such teaching communicates cannot be gleaned merely from dusty pages in whatever poor excuse of a prison library is available. Thinking about and defending ideas in a seminar or a paper is, for me, an essential component of genuine liberal learning, and the UBB makes it possible.

None of the UBB teachers are paid. Instead, they give unstintingly of their time, expertise, books, and, often enough, their money to keep the program running. Most students cannot afford to pay some distant university to grade a test and prove that they’ve learned the material. No wonder the UBB classes remain filled with students keen for what it offers.

UBB offerings comprise what we call our College Pathway courses (this semester features Pre-Calculus II, American Lit, Spanish I & II, and English Composition II) and our Certificate courses. The Certificate courses are often enough as rigorous as the College Pathway courses, with texts, homework, and tests; but unfortunately there’s no corresponding university accreditation. This semester we offer Understanding Family Violence, Ethics and Decision Making, Biology of Drug Use, Music History, Japanese II, Intro to Curriculum & Teaching I, Studio Art: Gouache Painting, and a Creative Writing workshop. In addition to these classes, we teach College Prep Math and College Prep English, where I’m happy to be a writing coach, helping basic writers develop their ability to read, think, and write to prepare them for the college work ahead.

Aside from the regular classes, the UBB also sponsors an eclectic Arts & Lecture series with Saturday night presentations that have ranged from a discussion of the physics of sound that featured a performance of Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major, BMV 1007, to topics such as opinion polling, evolution, mathematical modeling of the progress of epidemics, African-American history, and oceanography. Jake Cooper, a brilliant young biologist who has taught Astronomy for the UBB and is currently completing doctoral research on the mating habits of yeast, has given riveting accounts in various Arts & Lecture seminars on everything from modern game theory to the factitious quality of the color magenta. (The fact that still amazes me is that we don’t see the periphery in color: our brains just guess what the color might be; experiment with this for yourself.)

Without internet access there are few ways to get a college education through distance learning. Ohio University (OU) is one of the few remaining colleges that offer non-internet based correspondence courses and Course Credit by Examinations (CCEs). The cheapest option, CCE, costs about $310 for OU to grade one two- or three-hour test. It’s double that for the correspondence courses that, at best, come with a few marginalia comments on the submitted lessons. The UBB, however, is staffed with volunteer teachers who give weekly class time, grade papers and tests, and frequently give additional guidance in an effort to deliver to prisoners the same quality of education that their on-campus college students get. So, whether or not students are able to pay for accreditation or not, in a UBB class, they actually learn the material.

Although I am a writer and love the humanities (or, as my best friend, Atif says, easy classes without the rigors or beauty of mathematics) the UBB offers classes for everyone. To me, taking calculus classes in here would be like being in a prison within a prison, unlike the humanities, which inspire me with the accomplished examples of human perfection, a source of inspiration for my own craft, and a permanent ideal for which to aspire. My friend and fellow TA would argue that mathematics is the purest form of intellectual discipline, the basis of much of modern science, and perhaps even the sole incontrovertible truth to which human beings may have access. It accustoms the mind to proof, enables understanding of the complex social and economic phenomena that underlie modern society, and provides insight into the most fundamental questions of logic, reference, and meaning. Thankfully, my personal aversion to the arduous means of achieving these goals doesn’t interfere with my appreciation of them; nor does it obstruct the pleasure to be had in gaining these benefits for other students–as a TA, I simply refer all math questions to those who can understand them.

The UBB community embodies something absent in most of ordinary life, and certainly all of prison life: the sense of a shared pursuit of a goal that is intrinsically valuable and in which each of us has a contribution to make as well as much to receive. As the vast majority of prisoners waste their life on televised entertainment, day-room games, insulting each other, genuflecting before altars, and relieving their glory days, not of wine and roses, but of drugs and pimping, we in the UBB forge new, hopeful lives grounded in our common pursuit of educational excellence, service to society, and the cultivation of individual sensibility.

If you would like to learn more about the UBB, please click here. UBB is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization that would gladly appreciate any support you can offer. Also, for a more detailed and personal account of the UBB, please read “Time to Learn.”

I dedicate my most prized accomplishment to my dearest mom and to my best friend Dina, whose faith in me was unshakable!  I may not be able to point my mother or Dina from the stage of graduation, but I can tell the world about it!! -WOOHOO!!!-