I recently watched: “College Behind Bars”. A show on Netflix created by Ken
Burns. The show is about a select group of people in prison getting their associate's degree and bachelor’s degree while still incarcerated and carrying
out their sentence. These individuals are accepted into New York State’s Bard
liberal arts college. The program is called B.P.I. or Bard Prison Initiative. In
this program prisoners can graduate with an associate's degree and then choose
if they would continue to receive a bachelors while in prison.
Although
most education programs were disbanded in 1994 due to the passing of the Clinton
Crime Bill. colleges now can privately fund education in prison which is what
colleges such as Adams State University are currently doing. In the show
College behind bars, the college providing private funds is Bard college located in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. I have watched the show and
can see the change in the inmates who are receiving education. In our society
education is for only the rich and wealthy and to put it lightly is made more
readily available to white people.
I,
like many others did not give much thought to educating criminals but I have
always valued education. I am a white middle class American and I luckily have
access to a 2 year and 4-year college at my fingertips. It never crossed my
mind that maybe this does not always come easy for people in low income
families. For people raised in low income housing, education can be socially
and economically impossible to go through with. With peers and gang member
constantly giving easy options to make money for families with no income and
with poor families not having enough money to even provide for children going
through high school. Most of the people in prison have no G.E.D. or have a low
level of literary competency.
It begs the question:
Should
we be providing free education or any kind of education to those in Prison?
This
is a hard topic considering that education is not free to most citizens of the
united states but also most citizens can afford to go to college or have
opportunity for scholarships and funding their education. Why isn’t school free
to those who need it? Is education something you can pay for? I do not think
so. In most countries the approach to education is either to suppress it or to
use it to empower and educate its citizens. If we are only providing education
to those who can afford it then why are we surprised that people turn to crime
to make money for their families? If you only give jobs to white people than
why are you surprised that no African American citizens are working or going to
school?
No
matter what your side is on this topic the facts are: If you educate inmates,
they will not return to prison systems and have a means of providing for their
families and themselves. Regardless of the morals of whether we should be doing
it is irrelevant. If we want to have better citizens than we must make better
citizens. Standing idly by and only providing higher education and better jobs
to richer citizens is never going to end in your favor.
I
watch this show and I see not only an intellectual change but also a physical,
moral, and behavioral change in these inmates. If we can take each person and
get them the education or the help, they need regardless of their income we
will make better citizens in the end. More than 45 percent of inmates re-offend
and are back in jail in the next year, with programs that provide liberal arts
education only 4 percent of prisoners re-offend. Nelson Mandela once said, “Education is the
most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” If we stop putting
guns in the hands of criminals and start putting books there instead who knows
what kind of society, we could have.
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