Prison Teaching Initiative Helps Incarcerated Students Earn Degrees
‘It gives you a sense of how much intelligence and talent and imagination is locked up in prisons’
Published May 20, 2021
In a normal semester, participants in Princeton’s Prison Teaching Initiative (PTI) would lead dozens of courses for incarcerated students in New Jersey state correctional facilities and one federal prison. This spring, with pandemic-related restrictions, offerings were limited to seven classes taught with what officials called “approved distance learning techniques and modalities,” including paper instruction and assignment packets, textbooks, and brief, two-way electronic messages.
Jill Stockwell *17, PTI’s administrative director, is hopeful for a return to normal by fall. She’ll have plenty of volunteers available: As of mid-April, 130 graduate students, faculty, and staff had applied to teach or tutor in the coming year. Instructors work in teams, so about 100 can participate when there is a full course load.
“This is an opportunity to teach your own class, to create your own syllabus,” Stockwell said, “but also to give back and to extend the resources of an Ivy League institution to this incarcerated group of students, many of whom were pushed out of their school experiences and so are given the opportunity to have a college degree for the first time during a prison sentence.”
PTI has been a leader in New Jersey’s prison-education community, and programs like it seem poised to grow after Congress restored incarcerated students’ access to federal financial aid in the stimulus package passed in December 2020. At Princeton, Provost Deborah Prentice is considering an expansion of community education, including PTI, as part of the University’s efforts to address systemic racism.
Princeton’s involvement in prison education began in the astrophysics department more than 15 years ago, with postdocs Mark Krumholz ’98 and Jenny Greene and Professor Gillian Knapp volunteering as teachers and handling the administrative tasks as well. Greene, now a professor, serves as PTI’s academic director, and since 2017, the administrative work has been part of the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning.
“Every single [student] has recognized that education is the way to change their lives … .” — Jenny Greene, professor of astrophysical sciences
For graduate students eager to teach, PTI offers the chance to lead classes in math, science, social sciences, and the humanities. The program has offered lab courses for about a decade, including a physics lab added last year.
Most PTI students are pursuing an associate’s or bachelor’s degree through local community colleges and Rutgers University’s Mountainview program. Instructors say PTI teaching is a great experience because of the commitment of the students. While some haven’t been in a classroom in more than a decade, Greene said, “every single one of them has recognized that education is the way to change their lives when they get out.”
Goni Halevi, an astrophysics graduate student who has taught astronomy, physics, and algebra, said the students in prison are collaborative and engaged; they don’t hesitate to ask questions and aren’t concerned about how they are perceived by classmates. “They’re there to learn and to grow as students,” she said. “You really feel that in the way they interact with the instructors.”
English professor Jeff Dolven and graduate student Matt Rickard *19 taught one of PTI’s first “combined” classes, where Princeton students learn alongside incarcerated students, in 2018. In “Poetry and Belief,” six undergrads traveled weekly to East Jersey State Prison for a class that included 12 men enrolled in a Rutgers bachelor of arts program. They explored poems by historical and contemporary poets, and the incarcerated students were devoted to the material and the class discussions, said Dolven, who thought the Princeton students were “elevated by that intensity.”
“It gives you a sense of how much intelligence and talent and imagination is locked up in prisons,” Dolven said.
PTI’s work also has brought formerly incarcerated students to Princeton’s campus for summer internships in the sciences and humanities. This year’s internships will operate remotely because of the pandemic.
Dolven sees prison education as a tangible way for Princetonians to use their academic expertise to work toward social justice. “At a moment when everybody is asking, ‘What can I do?,’” he said, “this is one really important answer.”
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6 Responses
Steve Fallon ’76
3 Years AgoI agree wholeheartedly with Jeff Dolven’s observation that “much intelligence and talent and imagination is locked up in prisons” (On the Campus, June issue). Like my classmate Clint Van Dusen (Inbox, September issue), I was involved during my undergrad years with the Student Volunteer Council’s program with Joe Tumolo at Yardville Correctional Center (though, unlike Clint, only tutoring and not teaching courses). Over the last eight years I’ve been heavily involved here at Notre Dame in our A.A. and B.A. degree programs at Indiana’s Westville Correctional Facility. We draw applicants from four men’s prisons to our Westville program, and we’re in the process of launching a statewide network that will make degrees available at Indiana Women’s Prison.
At Westville I’ve taught Shakespeare, Milton, and Lyric Poetry courses. This term I’m teaching a Shakespeare course in tandem with a Notre Dame colleague teaching a course in Acting Shakespeare. In my courses I’ve found students as intelligent, creative, and hardworking as any I’ve taught in 43 years of teaching university students. One of my best, a first-year student at that, after finishing his term paper on Milton, worked on his own after the term and for no credit expanded the paper into an original, 35-page research paper that was published in Notre Dame’s Journal of Undergraduate Research. Many of the Westville students head my list of the most eager students I’ve ever taught. I’ve hosted the recent and new Notre Dame provosts to the prison to attend classes, and both told me that they weren’t prepared for the intellectual electricity and rigor of the discussions, which took place in acoustically challenging seminar rooms with their peeling paint and barred windows. As a member of the Faculty Steering Committee for our program, I regularly invite colleagues from across the university to teach at the prison, and without exception, those who teach once are hooked and become regulars. As I approach retirement, I plan to continue to teach in our prison program. My traditional Notre Dame students, high achievers from privileged backgrounds, were prepared for and headed to good colleges from their earliest years, and they would have succeeded whatever college they entered. Part of the joy of teaching in the prison program is working with students who would not otherwise ever find themselves in a seminar room, where they find their intellectual legs and gain justified self-confidence in their talents. I not only teach them, I learn with and from them.
Steve Heussner ’84
3 Years AgoThank you for your thoughtful article regarding Princeton’s effort to educate the incarcerated. You will be interested to know that Bert Smith ’76 was the CEO of the Prison Entrepreneurship Program (PEP) in Texas for eight years, 2010-2018. PEP teaches convicted felons how to channel their entrepreneurial skills into legal endeavors. PEP is a full-time program lasting one year and consists of six months of character-development training followed by a six-month business curriculum. Each student develops a business plan, competes for a $10,000 prize, and receives a certificate from Baylor University upon graduation. PEP also supplies seed capital for the graduate entrepreneurs, and to date, 390 businesses have been born in the process.
In addition to PEP’s full-time staff who manage the program inside and out, teams of executive volunteers spend about one day per month interacting and coaching students. My involvement has been as a volunteer during much of the time that Bert served as CEO. Under Bert’s leadership, PEP achieved a three-year student recidivism rate of 8 percent, vs. 25 percent for Texas and 50 percent nationally. And 100 percent of PEP graduates are employed within 90 days of release from prison, with a 23-day average time “from prison to paycheck” and an average starting wage of $12.60 per hour. Please visit pep.org for more information.
Clint Van Dusen ’76
3 Years AgoYou wrote in June, “Princeton’s involvement in prison education began in the astrophysics department more than 15 years ago … and since 2017, the administrative work has been part of the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning.”
Forty-five years ago I taught nonviolent, first-time young male offenders at the Yardville Correctional Center. This experience qualified me for both the Student Volunteers Council and my teacher’s certificate. My supervisors were Neal Germershausen and Joe Tumolo.
My teachings spanned from readings of Chaucer (including one ribaldly comic selection) to by what qualifications would one select a team of 12 to colonize the moon.
Rick Mott ’73
2 Years AgoMr. Van Dusen’s letter caught my eye, but not for its actual subject. It was his last teaching topic — selecting people for a lunar colony. Four of the six Apollo landings happened during my time at Princeton. Thinking back on watching them in the (former) Princeton Inn, did any of us in the tube room expect that we wouldn’t see footprints on Mars by our 50th reunion?
Kai L. Chan *08
3 Years AgoI went through the criminal-justice system in Toronto when I was a teenager. Luckily I have no criminal record, by grace of laws pertaining to young offenders in Canada. I was supposed to have spent six months in juvenile jail but was fortunate enough to have been sentenced to community service in lieu of prison time. Nevertheless, I did spend a brief period behind bars as part of that process. Most of the people in my prison block were childhood friends and friends of friends. (I grew up at a time when youth gangs were prevalent.) All were definitely street-savvy, if not book-smart. Indeed, many of the people in detention with me seemed just as sharp-minded as people I would go on to meet a decade later as a graduate student at Princeton.
Professor Jeff Dolven noted in the article about the Prison Teaching Initiative (On the Campus, June issue) that “much intelligence and talent and imagination is locked up in prisons.” I would add that for the most part, the talent is also wasted in prison.
Had I been sentenced to closed custody, my life would definitely have not taken a path toward a Princeton Ph.D. Instead, I would have likely turned out with dead-end life prospects and succumbed to recidivism like much of the incarcerated population (as was the case for those who were with me in juvenile detention). What separates a student from Princeton and an inmate in jail is quite often just luck.
John May
3 Years AgoI was what we call a Prison Governor (warden) in the English prison system, and privileged to spend some time at Princeton and in the New Jersey prisons.
It is always a challenge for people working in prisons to find resources for ventures which are not directly about custody and security. It was a delight to learn of a program in Princeton which is focussed specifically on the futures of those in custody, and which has become so well established over time in your prisons.
Our experience over here is that prisoners respond brilliantly to people coming in from the outside world and offering something of themselves. I have a particularly fond memory of some filmmakers who worked with some of our men in HMP Dartmoor when I was Governor. Several of those involved are still working in the film industry.
It was a great pleasure to read of the program, and I can assure those involved that their work will be hugely appreciated by the beneficiaries.