Fourth in a series
By DEBORAH E. LANS
HUDSON–When the three-man debate team from Eastern New York Correctional Facility in the Catskills beat a team from Harvard in 2015, people took notice. The next year, another team of incarcerated people beat debaters from Cambridge University, proving it was no fluke.
These were among the results of the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) – a private college in prison program, one of the few programs to survive federal and state funding cuts that occurred in the mid-1990s. With funding restored in 2023, such programs are again growing. In fact, in New York, the State University system is committed to having a degree-granting college program in every correctional facility in the state, and it is halfway there.
Education scholar Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, the former dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education who led Bard’s program for many years, put the rationale this way in her book “Liberating Minds”: “Today, prisons are schools for crime. They must become schools for citizenship.”
Brian Fischer, the former commissioner of the state Department of Corrections and Community Services, told The Columbia Paper that when he was superintendent of Sing Sing Correctional Facility a college-in-prison program was started at the urging of some incarcerated individuals. The results – which have since been repeated in the growing number of such programs – included a new attitude of respect and purpose among those enrolled in the program. Moreover, that attitude spread more broadly in the facility, to other incarcerated people and corrections officers alike, helping to diminish tensions and violence.
Adolfo Lopez, a Hudson resident, shared his life story (to date) with The Columbia Paper. His story is not unusual for those who have the opportunity to experience college in prison.
Mr. Lopez was born in Brooklyn. His father was, in his words, “deeply entrenched in the gang lifestyle” and his mother was also troubled. When he was young, the family moved to Greene County, where Mr. Lopez was one of a “handful of kids of color and there were no educators of color.” He joined a gang (the Bloods) at 13, began selling drugs and committing robberies.
In spite of this, for Mr. Lopez, high school provided needed structure, and he always maintained high grades. But, after he graduated, he was lost, and his criminal involvement escalated. In 2010 he was arrested after an armed, home invasion robbery during which one man was assaulted. During his first years of incarceration, he “fed into the narrative” that he had to be “bad.” Indeed, he was arrested while in prison for two additional violent felonies, spent 18 months in solitary, and became what he calls “the prototypical prisoner, one [who] became increasingly problematic within the carceral system.”
During his time in solitary, a visit from Mr. Lopez’s father forced the younger man to see that if he didn’t make a change, he would die either in prison or on the streets. He began to read voraciously – the one positive outlet then available to him in solitary.
After solitary, Mr. Lopez was sent to Greene Correctional Facility in Coxsackie, a medium security facility he says is known to its population as “Gladiator School” because of its atmosphere of violence. Mr. Lopez was, by that time, deeply interested in changing his circumstances. He signed up for a college class, and other classes followed. In 2014 the non-profit Hudson Link began offering a higher education program at Greene, and Mr. Lopez enrolled. One of his last classes before he was released, Introduction to Sociology, was taught by Joan Hunt, who leads the Greater Hudson Promise Neighborhood (GHPN). Six months after his release, Mr. Lopez began working at GHPN as an AmeriCorps volunteer.
Today, as GHPN’s assistant director, Mr. Lopez dedicates his time to helping others avoid prison and to cope with their circumstances – whether it is through youth mentoring, GHPN’s programs for the families of the incarcerated, working with the police and a host of other interventions. Along the way (because he was released from prison before completing his college studies) he also attained a BS in Journalism from SUNY Albany. At graduation, he wore a cap that Ms. Hunt had decorated with excerpts from his essays. He still has the cap today.
In an autobiographical piece written for SUNY, Mr. Lopez described the impact of his college-in-prison experience this way: “Being of Latino descent, I was aware that I was ‘less than’ from a young age. Layer that with being from a poor socioeconomic background and these feelings of ‘less than’ were a consistent, compounding factor throughout my life.
“Incarceration was not only difficult, it exacerbated every other dehumanizing factor I was born with . . . [including] the pervasive oppression by corrections officers and staff within the prison industrial complex, and I could literally feel this weight on my shoulders every waking moment.
“Higher education in prison was my ventilator . . . I felt the knowledge I was gaining, and it began to pump my lungs.”
Currently, Columbia-Greene Community College (C-GCC), in partnership with Hudson Link and SUNY, runs associate degree-granting programs in three Hudson Valley correctional facilities, including Greene Correctional. As with all of the college-in-prison programs, the curriculum is identical to that of C-GCC’s on-campus programs, involving the same requirements and paperwork. According to Christy Ward, who administers the program for C-GCC, the curriculum is designed to facilitate transferability to a full bachelor’s degree program and many enrollees plan to obtain full bachelor’s degrees.
C-GCC Professor Stacey Hills, who teaches business-related classes like marketing and accounting in the program, says that the skills the incarcerated gain are obviously important for their future employability and prospects, but the program also offers something more fundamental: her students say their professors see them “as persons and individuals, granting them a dignity” that the prison experience denies them. In addition, with 20 men in a classroom, all learn to exchange ideas; they become focused and purposeful.
Trent Griffin-Braaf likewise credits a prison-based higher education program as the catalyst that changed his life. He has not simply stayed out of trouble since release but he has, as he puts it, gone from “Felon to Forbes,” having appeared in the business publication as one of the next “1,000 Business Leaders in the World.” His successful company, Cohoes-based Tech Valley Shuttle, not only provides a much-needed transportation service throughout the Capital Region (including to correctional facilities) but more importantly it also primarily employs formerly incarcerated individuals.
Mr. Griffin-Braaf started to “fool around” in high school and at 19 was sentenced to serve 12 years for a non-violent drug crime. He ended up at Greene Correctional taking a college course, and his professor impressed on him that he was “very smart and shouldn’t sell himself short.” College-in-prison followed and taught him that he “had ability; I began to understand I needed to put in the work; but it gave me hope and the foundation for building confidence.”
Now, in addition to running Tech Valley Shuttle, Mr. Griffin-Braaf returns to Greene Correctional (as well as going to business settings) to lead workforce-development programs to better ready incarcerated individuals to reenter the job market and to assist employers to structure programs that maximize the chances that those individuals will succeed in employment.
Danielle Sered, founder of Common Justice, a non-profit that works to find solutions to violence, has written that “Decades of research about the individual-level causes of violence (as opposed to community conditions like poverty and disenfranchisement) has demonstrated four key drivers: shame, isolation, exposure to violence, and a diminished ability to meet one’s economic needs. At the same time, prison is characterized by four key features: shame, isolation, exposure to violence, and a diminished ability to meet one’s economic means.”
As former Commissioner Fischer put it, most incarcerated persons come to understand “what they did wrong and why they did it.” Incarcerated people feel shame for the decisions that lead them to prison, where they are isolated from their family and community, they experience a loss of privacy and control over their lives and a constant atmosphere of tension and sometimes violence, and their economic prospects are further dimmed.
The common experience of a college classroom can endow a sense of dignity and purpose, in Professor Hills’ words, and a foundation, as Mr. Griffin-Braaf puts it, for lasting change.
A future article will look at the costs and benefits (financial and otherwise) of college-in-prison programs and the C-GCC-SUNY-Hudson Link partnership that is making the program a reality locally.
To contact reporter Deborah Lans, email deborahlans@icloud.com
