The summer of 1991 feels so long ago, and yet, reminders of the earliest chapters of my carceral life still glare up from the otherwise crisp Coastline College transcript that now reflects the three AA degrees I recently earned via the Hope Scholars program, and the Honors distinction my grades entitle. The dated University of LaVerne and Ventura College transfer coursework references squatting therein shade the Youth Training School and Ventura School carceral settings that formed the only college classrooms I’d ever known – remnants of the state’s earliest outside-in college programs offered within California’s now-defunct Youth Authority apparatus, before Biden’s 1994 crime bill placed Pell funding beyond my reach and sidelined my pursuit of higher education.
To the casual observer, my 90’s era coursework would appear to reflect a student who attended two southern California campuses working towards an AA. In truth, I was a GED recipient participating in the state’s earliest Pell-funded youth prison college experiment offering in-person classes in support of a BA degree program more than two decades before the Ford Foundation first came to the state in 2013 to investigate higher education for incarcerated learners. Ford’s 18-month funding of a landscape analysis led to a $9.2M five-year multi-funder initiative comprised of thirteen stakeholder groups that smartly utilized philanthropy to compliment public systems by catalyzing the government action needed to erect the state’s prison college apparatus.
Thanks to the California College Promise Grant (CCPG), tuition for incarcerated community college students like me is now free, subject to academic and progress standards set by the Student Success Act of 2012. Despite the demise of Pell in 1994, the CCPG allowed me to claw my way back into college.
Per my 4.0 GPA for my coursework completed at Coastline, my 4.0 GPA for my coursework at Ventura, and my 3.76 GPA for my earliest circa 1991 coursework at LaVerne, I will graduate with a cumulative GPA of 3.8, which will entitle me to the distinction of graduating with Honors. This fall I will walk through a nondescript prison gymnasium to receive from Coastline the three AA degrees I earned in Social and Behavioral Sciences, American Studies, and Arts and Humanities. I will carry with me a hearty satisfaction and three decades worth of sublimated pride into a milestone moment the prison sadly won’t fully allow me to celebrate as I’d like to.
There won’t be any commencement speeches made by any formerly incarcerated Coastline alumni who once stood here in the Valley State Prison (VSP) gym as residents who are now thriving in the free world, because the prison doesn’t allow them to attend these ceremonies. I will have to be my own inspiration.
You’d think that a college graduation event held inside of a prison would be the setting most ripe for inspiring achievement in others, by having real-world success story exemplars take the podium and speak hope into the room as commencement speakers.
You’d think that the best way to inspire the current student body members who have yet to graduate would be to invite them to an event where they get to observe their peers graduate.
You’d think that a prison that publicly postures as valuing the power of mentorship – where Youth Peer Mentors, Peer Support Specialists, Peer Health Educators, and Literacy Mentors are employed by the state to offer peer mentor services to one another – would use this capstone moment to reinforce achievement and uplift the academic community.
You’d think, right?
Such are the ways the custody leviathan works to rob us of the fullness of our would-be normalized experience and dilute the self-actualizing potential of our accomplishments. It demonstrates a real blind spot in the eye of VSP.
I refuse to allow the prison industrial complex’s many methods to deny me the power of harnessing sentimentality, even if it concerns merely a brief walk across a prison gym floor while wearing a cap and gown, for therein resides the capacity to imagine, hope, reflect, and transform. It’s not about needing to be seen, heard, or acclaimed any more than it’s about needing to be inspired, per se. Sheer will can be as powerful to any of us as any thought experiment was to Einstein. Just as the universals swim in the theoretical ether, so too do the memories and dreams that sustain a wrecked life in need of renewal. It’s about persevering in the absence of external affirmations, and rewriting our mythologies with newly fashioned internal utensils.
That said, there is value in ceremony, and every community deserves to honor its members – even ours.
I first wrote about my extended stay travelogue experience as an incarcerated college student for College Inside’s Charlotte West, the only journalist who writes exclusively about higher education in prisons. My portion of the piece, titled Gladiator School, was published simultaneously in Slate, Open Campus, and San Quentin News, framing how though I’d been fortunate to begin my college experience under the old-school Pell program while housed in California’s Youth Authority (CYA) system as a youth offender, Biden’s 1994 crime bill, signed by then-President Clinton, eventually killed my ability to complete my degree by eliminating Pell funding for incarcerated learners.
I was left to sulk in the sour stew of Hillary’s infamous references about how we are all “super predators” who needed to be “brought to heel.” Since then, I’ve often wondered about that “village” she would later say it takes to raise guys like me. I’ve been reading about many of them in Elizabeth Hinton’s works tracing the rise of the prison industrial complex to the wake of Democrat social welfare policies at the height of the civil rights era.
In California, close to 12,000 incarcerated citizens are accessing higher education programs that offer residents like me AA, BA, and MA degree opportunities in partnership with in-state public and private universities, while nearly twice as many returning citizens are attending free world classes. More than 30,000 justice-impacted folks are doing the most with the opportunity to learn. The literary icons whose books I read and lives I revere, men like Reginald Dwayne Betts and Randall Horton, didn’t have carceral college program opportunities available to them while they were confined; however, guys like James DeBacco, Benjamin Frandsen, and Benito Gutierrez each attended carceral college classes at VSP, paroled from here, and went on to graduate from USC, UCLA, and CSU-Chico respectively.
They represent the best of our carceral alumni while amplifying the unique support systems that exist in the Underground Scholars, Project Rebound, and Unchained Scholars communities that help connect returning citizen students to campus resources.
A RAND Corp study found that for every $1 spent on higher education in prison, $4-5 is saved in future reincarceration costs. For budget hawks eager to isolate what works and excise programs that don’t, I’d say the priority needs to be everything that onboards college entry – period. Emory University found that while the national recidivism rate mirrors California’s decade-long trend of 55%, that number drops the more one is educated.
With vocational training, the rate shrinks to 30%; after attaining an AA degree the rate more than halves to 13.7%; after attaining a BA degree the rate more than halves again to 5.6%; and for those who achieve a masters degree while confined, the rate is 0%. In that recidivism directly impacts public safety, the state’s commitment to higher education deserves praise, particularly in light of how progressive the legislature has been in spite of having Pell funds extinguished for three decades.
Were I able to make a commencement speech of my own, I would thank Rebecca Silbert and Debbie Mukamal – the co-directors of Renewing Communities (RC) – and the thirteen organizational funders who stood behind RC to deliver higher education to incarcerated learners like me: Ford Foundation, The Andrew Mellon Foundation, Art for Justice Fund, Ballmer Group, Bank of America Charitable Foundation, California Endowment, The California Wellness Foundation, Roy and Patricia Disney Family Foundation, ECMC Foundation, Heising-Simons Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Rosenberg Foundation, and Weingart Foundation.
Because of them, tens of thousands of incarcerated folks are now embarking on an epic tuition-free journey of self-discovery that translates directly to transformation and improved public safety. From a guy who chased his AA dreams for 30 years: thank you for investing in education.
While some of these unlikely collaborators prioritized criminal justice reform, higher education, employment mobility, or community renewal, they also sought different outcomes, be it public safety, public systems change, or individual opportunity and transformation. Each agreed with the basic premise that higher education is a proven way to increase social mobility, open career pathways, and reduce recidivism, while believing that the state’s public higher education system could and should be the entity that reaches unserved students.
In a state where eight million people carry arrest records, over 90,000 adults are imprisoned, 58 county jails systems hold about 75,000 people, and hundreds of thousands are under probation and parole supervision, California also has the nation’s largest public higher education system. More than 2,000,000 students attend 115 community colleges, almost 500,000 students are enrolled at 23 CSU campuses, and more than 250,000 students attend ten UC campuses. I suppose it’s only fitting that the college experience has become the best tool corrections officials have to treat the criminogenic problem.
It shouldn’t be lost on the intellectuals that teaching someone how to think critically just might cause one to begin to rationally examine the world and his or her place in it.
Is it any wonder that once exposed to moral philosophy folks start to critique their beliefs, challenge their biases, and question their views? I dare say that this sort of self-discovery is what we should all desire for the people we incarcerate – how else does one instigate a moral reckoning? With nearly 40% of California’s imprisoned adults wading into the functional literacy gap by virtue of lacking a highschool diploma or GED, higher education should represent a “no-brainer” solution for corrections officials unsure of what to support. An informed public should demand more of it.
When we harm the life, liberty, and property of others, we forfeit our freedom – deservedly so. As badly as I’ve craved being educated, I would never be so self-absorbed that I’d invoke my right to humane treatment in order to try to guilt-trip society into providing me with an education, simply because I desire to be educated. That’s almost as idiotic as espousing a prisonless society that ignores the dangerous few. There’s nothing about being in prison that necessarily entitles me to the rehabilitative methods of my choosing.
That said, we didn’t arrive at this new normal whereby college is free to prisoners because the folks in government who discontinued my access to Pell funding thirty years ago suddenly had an epiphany following the failure of Three Strikes policies. We got here because philanthropic monies, guided by two exceptional lawyers, (Silbert and Mukamal), demonstrated a proof of concept that pushed public agency actors into action for a long enough period of time that the cost-effective analysis and recidivism trends that support the efficacy argument could breathe long enough to justify spending taxpayer dollars on higher education.
Numbers don’t lie. Higher education just works.
