Current Affairs

San Quentin is the state’s oldest prison, and it is also the only one that still provides free college-level education to inmates. UC Berkeley graduate student Robert Rogers takes us inside the prison gates to explore the impact of the Prison University Project.

ROBERT ROGERS: Lt. Sam Robinson is San Quentin’s public information officer and a former guard at the prison. As he walks down the dim corridors of California’s oldest prison, the rusty metals and peeling paints convey a sense of time standing still.

LT. SAM ROBINSON: This is prison, as it has run here for decades.

But a short walk away, across a courtyard from the stifling cell blocks, there’s something else. It’s a college classroom with an instructor leading a discussion between students who are also San Quentin inmates.

Karen Martin is one of the dozens of volunteer teachers who comprise the backbone of the Prison University Project.

KAREN MARTIN [speaking to class]: The in-group out-group thing is whatever you are, people who are like you are in your in-group. But it could be on any given thing, it could be race, it could be class, it could be education …

The project is a private, nonprofit education program that offers about 300 inmates the opportunity to earn an associate of arts degree. The program was launched in the mid-’90s, soon after Congress voted to axe federal funding to higher education in prisons across the country. Today, the university project in San Quentin is the only accredited, free-of-charge higher education program behind California prison walls.

Executive director Jody Lewen says the program is more vital now than ever.

JODY LEWEN: The demand for education is just going through the roof. We get about, between five and ten letters a day from prisoners at other institutions in the state who are trying to get to San Quentin cause they’ve heard about our program. We have guys who are trying to sneak into our college prep classes because there’s nowhere else to learn.

Lewen, the project’s founder and executive director, is one of three paid employees of the nonprofit, which has an annual budget of around $400,000. Like most of her volunteers, Lewen is long on idealism.

LEWEN: There was no way not to go to college where I grew up. The vast majority of people in this institution, probably in this system, if they had gone to my little private school, never would have seen the inside of this place, no question.

Inmates at San Quentin may choose from a range of classes, from ethics and English to math and natural science.

Four students graduated with an associates degree in June, during a poignant ceremony in a prison worship hall. Prison officials and students’ families attended the ceremony.

GRADUATING STUDENT: Mom, this is for you as much as it for me.

Troy Williams is one of the success stories pointed to by prison officials. A hulking 42-year-old from Los Angeles, Williams is serving a life sentence for robbery and kidnapping.

After about two years in the program, the upbeat Williams is optimistic about earning a degree and, someday, rejoining society. He says education is a positive influence among prisoners.

WILLIAMS: When you come here and you have people who are able to be challenged intellectually and meet those challenges, they think of different ways to resolve problems, as opposed to the lowest level – physical violence. A lot of times what you will see around here is when stuff happens people will go to their mental toolbox as opposed to their physical toolbox.

One of Williams’ English teachers is Kelly Jane Rosenblatt, a 31-year-old PhD candidate and volunteer.

KELLY JANE ROSENBLATT: My father was incarcerated, and I realized when I was corresponding with him that there’s not a lot of opportunities in prison, and that’s when I first learned about this program.

Rosenblatt said failures in childhood education contribute to the state’s prison crisis.

ROSENBLATT: I used to teach middle school in East Oakland, at the lowest-performing middle school in Oakland, and I lost a lot of students over the course of two years. I come in here and I don’t see inmates, I constantly refer to them as students; I caught myself earlier talking about their dorms.

The wait list for classes at San Quentin’s University Project is long, with a hundred on the list. And it’s likely to get longer.

LEWEN: What’s wrong with this picture, how is it that people don’t understand what’s going on here?

Lewen hopes to see steady growth in the program, which relies entirely on private donations, but says a down economy might put a damper on the contributions.

LEWEN: We run the entire campus on less than a half-a-million dollars a year, we have almost 300 students. You’d think that’s an unbelievable bargain, but you talk to most higher education funders they say, ‘oh well, we don’t do criminal justice.’

While the state looks for further budget cuts in its corrections system, the university project is likely to remain the only program of its kind serving the state’s 30 plus prisons and 160,000 inmates.

This report was produced as part of the News21 program, a public service reporting project conducted at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism and sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Attribution: This article originally appeared in SF Gate on July 26, 2010. Read Story

Please note that the Prison University Project became Mount Tamalpais College in September 2020.

Attribution: This originally appeared on The Ark on July 14, 2010.

Please note that the Prison University Project became Mount Tamalpais College in September 2020.

Attribution: This originally appeared on KoreAm Journal in June 2009.

Please note that the Prison University Project became Mount Tamalpais College in September 2020.

In our Behind the Scenes series, CNN correspondents and producers share their experiences in covering news and analyze the stories behind the events. CNN’s Soledad O’Brien and Stan Wilson visited San Quentin for “CNN Presents: Black in America” which premiered July 23 and 24, at 9 p.m. ET.

SAN QUENTIN, California (CNN) — San Quentin Prison sits like a fortress along the bay just north of San Francisco. It is bordered by some of the most expensive residential real estate in the country. But at the edge of this scenic peninsula, 5,400 inmates are locked up.

San Quentin has California’s only death chamber, with 656 inmates waiting to be executed.

On death row, each prisoner is confined to a cell just large enough for a bed and toilet.

Walking along these multitiered cells, where each inmate is closely monitored or escorted in shackles, reminded me of all the pain and grief endured by relatives and friends of victims like Laci Peterson, Polly Klaas or Christine Orciuch, a mother of three who was shot to death by gang member Marcus Adams in front of her 10-year-old son during a bank robbery in Santa Barbara.

Less than a few hundred yards from death row, the climate is vastly different.

We found makeshift classroom bungalows and an exercise yard where inmate Larry Faison was performing the tunes of Miles Davis with his vintage trumpet. This environment looked and felt more like a community college setting.

This is where low- and midlevel convicts are able to get out once a day. There is a tennis court, a punching bag, a baseball stadium donated by the San Francisco Giants, a library and visiting instructors from prestigious universities.

Lt. Sam Robinson, a 27-year veteran of San Quentin, gave a tour of 27 vocational programs run by about 3,000 volunteers as part of the Prison University Project, a nonprofit education program that offers many black men an opportunity to earn an associate of arts degree. It helps give those eligible for parole the intellectual tools to compete in a vastly changing job market.  Inmate: It took coming to prison to see someone in school »

Advocates say that many black men imprisoned across America, particularly nonviolent drug-related offenders, have enormous potential to become productive, law-abiding members of society through higher education in prison.

University of California at Berkeley professor Rebecca Carter volunteers as a biology instructor at San Quentin. During her first semester, she was startled by what she discovered.

“I’ve been teaching on the Cal campus and teaching at the prison at the same time, and they were significantly more engaged when I was in the prison,” Carter told CNN’s Soledad O’Brien. “Not always more in command with the subject matter but more engaged, doing the homework, asking questions because they were passionate about learning.”  Tour San Quentin’s Prison University Project »

Carter said there are also benefits for those serving a life sentence.

“There is a person in my biology class, who I know is a lifer, who has a teenage son. He was talking to me about how he was so glad to be in class because he was taking the same class that his kid was taking in high school and he could actually talk with his son about an intellectual thing, showing him that he took education seriously,” Carter said.

“He expects his children to take education seriously, and he does not want them to go down the path he went on, and he’s doing what he can to do something better for himself. And now, they could talk about mitochondria, and they can talk about ‘How did your class go?’ ” she said.

There is also the story of Willie Earl Green, whom I met in February during our documentary filming of inmates Chris Schurn, Marvin Andrews and Aly Tamboura.

Andrews, Schurn and Tamboura are all pursuing their associate of arts degrees through the Prison University Project.

Andrews and Schurn both earned their GED certificates at San Quentin. Andrews is serving a 15-year sentence for voluntary manslaughter, and Schurn is serving four years for cocaine possession. Tamboura, who tutors inmates, is serving 14 years for using a firearm in the commission of a criminal threat.

Green was serving 33 years to life for the murder, robbery and burglary of a Los Angeles woman in 1983 but always proclaimed his innocence. He earned a liberal arts degree in prison and tutored hundreds of others.

Green’s conviction was on appeal when we met, so I took a few notes but concluded that there was little chance his case would be overturned.

About one month later, I was surprised to learn that his case was indeed thrown out. A Los Angeles judge set the graying 56-year-old free, ruling that the prosecution’s star witness, Willie Finley, lied to a jury during key portions of his testimony.

“I was once a freedom marcher in Mississippi fighting for civil rights and social justice during the Martin Luther King Jr. era,” Green told me during his final days in prison. “I would never ponder harming anyone, let alone kill a human being, after spending my early life fighting for nonviolent social change the way King taught us.”

Our cameras were present at his release hearing, and we captured Green’s reunion with his wife, Mary, a breast cancer survivor.

On June 19, Green was invited back to San Quentin to deliver the commencement speech for the graduating class of 2008. He received a three-minute standing ovation from more than 300 inmates, prison officials and relatives. Green was a tutor of this year’s valedictorian and emphasized the value of education.

“I learned never give up, never give up hope, and never allow anyone to define you,” Green told the audience. He told me he felt guilty about leaving his friends behind, but the experience was much different. “This time, the sound of the prison gates closing was a good ‘cling,’ ” he said.

Ninety days after his release, Green told me that he is slowly adjusting to life and that he’s not bitter.

“I don’t hate anybody,” he said. “I don’t hate Willie Finley for doing what he did. I forgive him, too.”

Although most inmates are well aware that an associate of arts degree is not a ticket to success, it’s not the end of the educational road for many ex-cons.

Several inmates have been accepted at universities, and Carter, the Berkeley professor, is convinced that higher education in prison can reduce recidivism.

“I have followed the few people who have gotten out, who got their AA here and are now in school outside in San Francisco State in Santa Cruz and actively pursuing a degree because they know that’s the way to reestablish their level of responsibility,” Carter said.

Jody Lewen, executive director of the Prison University Project, is trying to broaden Carter’s objective.

“We have to talk about how much we hate and fear them first and challenge those thinking patterns,” Lewen said. “Higher education is an opportunity to reverse the trends because demonizing black men has been good for business. I want to change that.”

But the odds against breaking the cycle of incarceration are tough. There are nearly 1 million black men behind bars nationwide, and at least 50 percent of all ex-cons wind up back in prison in the state of California for nonviolent offenses.

Attribution: This originally appeared on CNN on February 26, 2009. Read Story

Please note that the Prison University Project became Mount Tamalpais College in September 2020.

Fifteen men settle into their seats in the classroom and open notebooks. “Hand forward your papers,” the instructor says. It’s the second essay of the semester, and for some of these students, among the first college papers they’ve written.

“Was the workshop on writing this paper helpful?” asks Tom Hendrickson, the history graduate student instructor.

“Yes. Tremendously,” answers one student. All the others agree, though one adds, “We’ll see what our grades look like. Then we’ll know how helpful it was.” Laughter ripples across the windowless classroom, which is warm from late-spring weather.

A typical classroom moment, but this is anything but a typical group of students. Each of these men in this ancient history class is an inmate at San Quentin State Prison. Their classroom, while lacking a view to the dusty yard outside, does have one glass wall that faces out to security guards seated in the hall.

At San Quentin, only the inmates can wear blue—the prisoner uniform consists of jeans and long, light blue shirts with the word “CDC PRISONER” in large letters across the back. Visitors, including instructors who come at least once every week, adhere to a strict dress code so they won’t be mixed up with prisoners or guards. Visitors are escorted by prison staff to the classroom portables across the yard, where inmates exercise and play basketball, with Marin’s brown hills rising outside the barbed wire fence.

Inside the class, past the various security checkpoints, it’s possible to forget that this is a medium-security prison. These men are here to learn, to discuss what they are reading, to engage one another in what may be the prison’s only racially integrated environment and to study history.

“We learn from our mistakes and we learn from our successes,” says Dan, a prisoner who is one of Hendrickson’s students, to explain why he’s in the class. “We all hear about the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, but how did it rise and how did it fall?”

San Quentin, California’s oldest prison, with its fortress-like facades and 1890s-era wrought-iron front gate, offers the state’s only on-site prison college degree programs (another, offered by San Diego City College, has been discontinued due to lack of funds). About 250 prisoners each semester enroll in college preparatory or associate of arts courses. The project at San Quentin is an extension site of Oakland’s Patten University. Since there is no tuition or state or federal funding for prison higher education, the program is supported by donations to the Prison University Project. Twelve courses are offered each semester, in the humanities, social sciences, math and science. All instructors are volunteers, and many, like Hendrickson, are from U.C. Berkeley. So far 74 men have completed their associate of arts degrees through this program at San Quentin.

Jody Lewen has directed the college program at the prison since 2000. Lewen, who received her doctorate in rhetoric from Berkeley, visits the prison frequently. Her commitment to the program is evident as she escorts a visitor across the prison yard, calling out greetings to men who gather in the yard before class in the fading evening light. Under her leadership the program has flourished. There are more volunteer instructors than the program can accommodate, but space is at a premium.

“Education isn’t the goal of the prison, clearly,” says Lewen, gesturing toward the ceiling of a barn-like structure that houses several math courses. While the building could easily accommodate two levels of classrooms, students and instructors crowd into the space, working in storage “cages” that have doors made of bars. “We have to use every nook and cranny.”

An inmate can take enough courses at San Quentin to earn an associate of arts degree—two years shy of a B.A. There are very few computers available, so most papers are turned in handwritten. Dan, the inmate in the ancient history class, earned his G.E.D. in county jail. In his cell at San Quentin he turns a bucket upside down to create a writing surface when the prison library is closed. The library, Dan says, has a limited selection of books, including a partial set of encyclopedias.

“I’m a high-school dropout,” he says. “I wasted 15 years and now I’m trying to make myself a success.”

Volunteering in a prison classroom was never what Victoria Kahn imagined doing when she became a professor of English and Comparative Literature. But the rewards have been high.

“The first semester I taught, they thanked me for showing up,” she says. “San Quentin students appreciate the power of the classroom. It’s very empowering for them because they are treated respectfully, like the human beings they are. You have 150 percent of their attention.”

Kahn’s first experience at San Quentin was co-teaching an English class. Keeping with the course’s theme of Nature and Human Nature, the class read Kafka’s novella, Metamorphosis, the story of a traveling salesman who wakes up one day to find he has turned into a giant cockroach.

She recalls one student who was very engaged in class discussions at the beginning of the semester, but then quite suddenly stopped coming. Then to Kahn’s surprise, he returned to class the day the paper was due. He seemed quite agitated, she says, and stood up to explain that he had had a hard time reading the book because Kafka was a Jew.

Kahn’s story illustrates how issues like race and religion are unavoidable and unique in prison culture. California is one of the last states to continue housing new prison arrivals in racially segregated cells, as a way to curb gang violence. Even though the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the state’s prisons to begin integrating prisoners this past July, it’s a slow process that has yet to have substantial impact at San Quentin. Technically, the non-housing areas of state prisons like San Quentin are already integrated, including the dining hall and yard. But in practice inmates self-segregate in those common areas, like grouping with others of their own race out on the yard.

Being in one of the prison’s classrooms may be the only time prisoners are in a racially mixed setting—not just sitting together, but actually interacting. While the classes are relaxed, instructors say they are always aware of the fact that they’re in a unique and potentially charged environment. Some say that while they ask Berkeley students to pair up in class to discuss material, they never do so at San Quentin. Pairing up, they say, might lead to unfriendly combinations and trouble.

So when Kahn’s student openly copped to his anti-Semitism in class, it was surprising and a little unnerving. But then he surprised her again.

“He wrote that even though Kafka was a Jew, he had a lot to teach about alienation,” Kahn recalls. “Later in class he actually said, ‘I really have come to appreciate what literature can do to change your mind.’”

Jody Lewen hears the question all the time: Why would somebody in prison for a long time, or even forever, need an education?

“I can’t imagine even believing that they wouldn’t need education,” she says. Her zeal softens when she considers the way most people see prisoners—as a faceless mass of bad people who are behind bars for good reason. She is also quick to note that, culturally, we tend to see education in just as limited a way.

“We are programmed to think about education as job training in the most sterile sense,” she says. And to be sure, she sees the practical value of education for these prisoners. Someday, she hopes, prisoners will be able to earn a B.A. and even study beyond the undergraduate level.

But what gets Lewen excited about her work is when she hears prisoners like Ricky talk about how the courses he’s taken through University Project have changed his life.

“I’ve learned a lot about myself and my culture, other cultures, ethics, imagination,” he says. “It seems like I should have been aware of these things at an earlier age. But I ended up at San Quentin and now I’m ready to reclaim my life.”

Ricky has taken classes in critical thinking and math, which make up the largest percentage of offerings in the Prison University Project, but courses in English and history are also well subscribed. In fact, teaching at San Quentin inspires some humanities professors to remember why they teach.

“I feel that teaching at San Quentin is an intensified version of what I do at Berkeley,” says Kathleen McCarthy, a professor of Classics and Comparative Literature. “A lot of these guys never expected to be in a college classroom, so to be treated as a student allows them to bring pure intensity to learning.”

McCarthy co-taught the Ancient History course with Tom Hendrickson in the spring. While many of her students at San Quentin may not have the same level of academic preparation as Berkeley students, McCarthy says that class discussions interpreting the similarities between our world and ancient civilization take place in much clearer relief in a prison classroom.

“It’s no surprise to me that teaching is the volunteer activity of choice for so many of our faculty and graduate students,” says Janet Broughton, a professor of philosophy and Berkeley’s current dean of arts and humanities. “They quite simply love their areas of study, whether literature, philosophy or history, and so for them, sharing this love of learning is deeply satisfying.”

To be sure, there are some headaches involved in teaching at San Quentin—communication with students outside of class is impossible. There can be no office hours or late-night e-mail conversations. Instructors also have to send all their course materials to Prison University Project staff well ahead of time to be copied and distributed, so they can’t be spontaneous with their lecture materials. Students also may have never taken a history course before and may have had little experience writing college papers.

But the level of student engagement is high. San Quentin students are more vocal in class than typical college students, instructors say. Inmates don’t hesitate to make their observations public. Students in McCarthy’s class pointed out similarities between Roman society and our own, noting, for example, that votes in Rome were cast in order of a person’s wealth, McCarthy says, so that by the time a poor person voted, an election may have already been decided.

“That’s good, that they are looking for parallels,” she says. “But sometimes I have to push them to think about history is a more nuanced way. What does it mean, I ask them, that unlike the Roman state the U.S. actually codifies equality in its constitution? That we strive for equality even if it seems that we don’t always achieve it?”

That notion might hit a nerve for Ricky, who says he can’t undo the mistakes he made that landed him in prison, but he wants a second chance.

“People make mistakes, but what are we going to do after those mistakes?” he says. “Are we going to keep people ignorant? My dream is to be an entrepreneur. I’ve spent a lot of time in prison studying the stock market and economics and capitalism, because if you don’t have any money, what are you going to do?”

———————————————
Is it Safe?, an exhibit of essays and photographs from the Prison University Project, will be on display through Oct. 22 at Alcatraz Island. For more information see www.prisonuniversityproject.org.

Kate Rix is an Oakland-based writer. She is a former editor of The Monthly.

Attribution: This article originally appeared in The Monthly in October of 2008. Read Story

Please note that the Prison University Project became Mount Tamalpais College in September 2020.

Attribution: This originally appeared on Congressional Quarterly Weekly on September 15, 2008.

Please note that the Prison University Project became Mount Tamalpais College in September 2020.

San Quentin’s Prison University Project helps inmates learn to read and write, secure an AA degree and gain new self-respect.

In 1996, when a jury convicted Jay Ly for manslaughter related to road rage, the judge ordered him to pay $3,500 for the funeral of the person he had killed. For a moment, Ly was shocked. “And I thought, ‘Oh, shoot—funeral,’” he says. “It had never occurred to me that there was a funeral.”

It wasn’t that Ly, then an 18-year-old Asian gangbanger from Southern California, didn’t know that he had killed someone. It was just that he had never thought about the consequences of his crime all the way through until that moment in the courtroom. He had never before considered the funeral and the grieving families and the loss that were caused by his actions. “Those thoughts had never been mentioned to me, and I never would have learned them if the judge hadn’t said that,” he says now.

It wasn’t until toward the end of Ly’s 10-year sentence, half of which was spent in Marin County’s San Quentin State Prison, that he continued the spark of deeper thinking he had started that day in the courtroom. He began taking classes at the Prison University Project at San Quentin.

Prior to the classes, even after five years of prison, Ly describes himself as being a bit of a hothead. When he first got to San Quentin in 2001, he almost started a riot against white inmates, but another prisoner stopped it at the last minute. Then he started hearing about the university, where inmates could take classes in everything from math to Spanish to philosophy.

“A couple of guys, Eddie and another guy, Mike, had all these books and were doing speeches and stuff, and they would come to my cell and say, ‘Hey, man,’ and would talk to me,” he recalls. “They were always talking about school and stuff and I was like, ‘Yeah cool, whatever,’ you know. But then the spring semester came and I took some courses.”

Over time, the classes began to work their way into Ly’s spirit. In his ethics class, reading Plato and Locke and other philosophers, he started looking at the world in new ways. He began to think critically, to reason, to question. And like that moment in the courtroom, he began to feel empathy for the world around him. “I would be in class and go, ‘Oh shoot, I never thought of it that way before,’” he says. “I was even a vegetarian for a while because I felt so bad for eating meat because of that class.”

San Quentin’s Prison University Project is the only onsite university for inmates in California. About 200 men take about two classes a semester toward their AA degrees. Since the university was founded in 1996, 68 students have earned AA’s at San Quentin, and many more have transferred and gone on to complete their studies after being paroled. The school is an extension of Patten University, a nondenominational Christian college based in Oakland.

Despite struggling at times, the Prison University Project gains momentum and prestige every year. It is also controversial. At a time when the cost of a four-year college education in California is approaching $100,000, many people are against providing free higher education to inmates.

“If you are a working-class family and you are law-abiding and struggling to put your kids through school, you may think, ‘Why should someone be able to commit a crime and then go to prison and get a college education?’” says Terry Thornton, spokesperson for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR). “People are supportive of education, but the taxpayers are not going to want to pay for prisoners to get a college degree while in prison.”

Building a School

Today, San Quentin’s university is completely privately funded. It didn’t start out that way. Originally, the university was supposed to be government-funded. Then, in 1994, Congress barred prisoners from receiving Federal Pell Grants, which in turn eliminated funding to higher education in prisons and forced some 350 programs to shut down. San Quentin would have done the same if it weren’t for one person: Jody Lewen.

In 1998, Lewen, a graduate student at UC Berkeley, went to a conference on psychoanalysis and happened to sit by someone who worked in San Quentin’s university program. Soon after, Lewen decided to volunteer to teach literature and composition to the inmates. Although she liked the university, Lewen could see how it could be so much better than it was, so she took an active role. She began e-mailing and contacting people in charge for more resources and bringing up her thoughts on the project to anyone who would listen.

Then the project’s executive director announced that he was leaving for another job in two weeks. People began saying the university would close down. They also started looking to Lewen for answers. “And I thought, ‘I’ll kill myself if I just stand here and watch this happen,’ you know,” says Lewen. “So I ended up saying, ‘This is really, really important to a lot of people, and I have to stabilize it somehow.’”

After she took over as executive director, Lewen found that she loved her new job. It was challenging, sure, but also satisfying. The inmates were so grateful and loved the classes so much, and it allowed Lewen a chance to teach and work in social justice at the same time.

“I was always a little uncomfortable teaching kids at Berkeley, because no matter what, I knew those people were going to be OK,” she says. “So I thought, ‘Oh, my God, here’s a way I can be in an academic setting and still help more marginal and needy people.’”

To generate funding, Lewen formed a nonprofit to support the university. Today, it is funded through donations from individuals, private foundations and corporations. Publishers donate textbooks. The classes are taught by approximately 60 volunteer teachers, most of whom are graduate students or instructors from Sonoma State University, UC Berkeley, SFSU and other Bay Area universities.

Freeing Minds

Running an accredited university within a prison system is a difficult challenge, to say the least. Much of Lewen’s time is divided between two things: getting funding and appealing to prison officials.

Since 2001, for example, Lewen has been trying to get officials to give her more classroom space. The university needs a minimum of eight classrooms five nights a week, but currently only has an average of three classrooms a night. Now, thanks to some pressure from members of the state Legislature, Lewen is seeing signs that her request may be granted. The Prison Industry Authority is building modular buildings, and one may be put aside for the university.

Although this is a positive development, six years is a long time to wait for such a basic resource. “Someone said to me, ‘Wow you’re running an entire college for us for free and all you’re asking for is some place to put it, and we can’t even do that,’” says Lewen. “‘What’s wrong with us?’”

While San Quentin’s program is the only on-site university in the state, other college opportunities are popping up for prisoners elsewhere. The CDCR is working with California community colleges to create opportunities for prisoners to learn online and through correspondence courses. In June, 71 inmates earned AA degrees this way at Ironwood State Prison and Chuckawalla Valley State Prison, making them the largest group of prisoners to graduate at one time with higher educational degrees in the United States.

Still, according to Thornton, there are no plans for taxpayers to pay for college education for prisoners. And we probably couldn’t afford to, anyway: the budget for the CDCR is $10 billion plus another $7.4 billion allocated to build 40,000 new prison beds. By comparison, the budget for higher education in California is around $15 billion. For the first time in the state’s history, Californians are paying more for prisons this year than they are for higher education.

On the other hand, studies suggest that spending money on educating prisoners may cost the taxpayer less in the long run. People who get an education in prison are far less likely to commit new crimes when they are released on parole, which means fewer repeat offenders. A 2001 study by the City University of New York found that prisoners who take college classes are four times more likely to behave themselves when they are released. It also found that college prison programs save taxpayers about $900,000 per 100 students every two years. It is more expensive to house a prisoner for a second and third time than to educate him once.

Prison education also lowers the toll that repeat criminals take on a community. “Ninety percent of people in prison today will be released back into the community,” says Owen Modeland, president of the Correctional Education Association, which serves educators and administrators who teach prisoners. “College education can mean that an ex-offender will get a job, pay taxes, support his family and stay out of trouble.”

Micro Macro

All inmates at the Prison University Project have to take college prep courses before they can start taking college-level classes, whether they have a high school diploma or GED or not. “I was naive about this when I went into the program,” says Lewen. “I thought, ‘Oh, a high school diploma. That means they should be able to write an essay, write a full sentence.’ No. A lot of students the schools are graduating can barely read or write.”

Half of California’s 173,000 prisoners read at a seventh-grade level and almost a quarter read below a third-grade level. Because of this, the college prep course in language skills starts with such basics as grammar and spelling. By the end of the semester, everyone has learned to write a five-paragraph essay.

The inmates are also required to take a college prep math course to get up to basic algebra. In some cases, this means reviewing decimals, fractions and multiplication tables. For other people, it means learning basic math for the first time.

“It is unbelievable,” says Lewen. “I had no idea going in what it was like. The story of what’s going on in California’s public school system is in the Prison University Project.”

Prisoners often couldn’t concentrate when they were in school because of other pressing issues like abuse, hunger, drug addiction, homelessness and gang activities. Additionally, a large portion of the prison population have undiagnosed learning disabilities, like ADD or dyslexia, making classroom time just that much more difficult. When they were ignored or chided by teachers for their disabilities, they may have acted out and slid into behavioral problems. Whatever the case, with most of them the educational system did not address their needs.

“In a way, prisoners are society’s failures,” says Department of Corrections spokesman Thornton. “When the average reading level is seventh grade, there have been a lot of failures. I’m not saying that that is the case with everyone; there are certainly people who deserve to be in jail. But a lot of people have been failed along the way.”

For these inmates, going back to school can bring back bad memories or unexpected emotions. It’s common for a prisoner to believe he is stupid and incapable of learning, and discovering this is not true can be upsetting. Some inmates will drop out of class when they start to do well, assuming it must not be a real class if they can get good grades.

Ly stayed in high school for the girls; if he had gone to an all-boys school, he jokes, he would have dropped out in the ninth grade. Yet he knew he was good at math. In 11th grade, he skated through calculus while barely paying attention, squeaking by with a C.

Still, Ly didn’t think of himself as intelligent until his prison classes. “I started realizing that I’m smart,” he says. “Not a super genius or anything, but I’m pretty quick. And I started thinking, ‘Hey, I could do something with my life.’”

This realization came slowly as Ly kept getting A’s. Then, for his intro to ethics class, he wrote a 30-page essay for his midterm, the longest thing he had ever written. When it was handed back, the teacher praised the essay in front of the class.

“She said, ‘This is the best paper in class,’” he remembers. “When I look back, it was nice. She said, ‘I don’t give out A-pluses very often.’ She had handed out only fours A-pluses in her whole career. I got an A-plus in that class because of that midterm.”

Life’s Random Pattern

Ly is one of many students who has been encouraged by the Prison University Project. When David Deutsch was sent to San Quentin for trafficking cocaine and marijuana in 2000, one of the first things he heard about from the other inmates was the university. “They absolutely loved that program,” he says. “There is no group of people more enthusiastic about learning than these prisoners.”

Deutsch, who got his bachelors from Humboldt State University in 1976, spent much of his time in prison tutoring other prisoners. Still, in his last year in San Quentin, he took some courses in Spanish. The class not only re-ignited his love of learning, he found that it distracted him from his situation in a way that almost nothing else did.

“When I would sit in Spanish class, I would forget I was in prison and just focus on Spanish,” says Deutsch, who was paroled in 2003 and is now pursuing a graduate degree in social work. “That may be another reason they love it so much. They completely forget about the fact that they are incarcerated. You temporarily forget where you are.”

Like most people, when Lewen first volunteered to teach at San Quentin, she was a little concerned about her safety. She was surprised to find that the prisoners were not threatening at all, but respectful and pleasant. In fact, in the program’s 11 years, there has never been a fight in a classroom and no teacher has ever been assaulted. By getting past the prison stereotype and getting to know the men as people, Lewen has started to see the potential the inmates once had—and, in many cases, still have.

“It’s almost like, as a society, we imagine people in prisons as a composite image of all the people who have ever committed a crime,” Lewen says. “Everyone imagines a psychopath. It’s just such a waste. Most of the people I see, if they had gone to my little private school in New York, they would have never been in prison. No way.”

For Ly, reentering society has been difficult after 10 years in jail, but he is still managing to get A’s in his five classes. While he finds the classes at SFSU are harder than the ones at the Prison University, the students are also less enthusiastic about learning.

“People here just sit in class, they don’t participate, they’re like, ‘Whatever, when are we going to be done?’” he says. “Half the class doesn’t show up. The class will have 60 students and only 30 will come.”

Ly can’t afford to be that apathetic. If he hadn’t gone to the Prison University, Ly thinks he would still be in jail now. Considering all it has given him, education is his top priority. “I know it’s work,” Ly says. “If I don’t have an education, with my background, things would be tough for me. That’s what education means to me.”

Attribution: This originally appeared on the Bohemian on October 31, 2007. Read Story

Please note that the Prison University Project became Mount Tamalpais College in September 2020.

Some of the men, who wore tasseled caps and gowns over their prison-issued blue denims, are serving life sentences. Others are newbies – behind bars less than a year. And the keynote speaker: a bank-robber-turned-author.

In an emotional graduation ceremony Thursday, seven inmates received associate’s degrees at San Quentin State Prison – the newest batch of graduates in the state’s only on-site prison college program. They were joined in the front pews of the prison chapel by a few dozen men who had earned their GEDs, high school diplomas and vocational certificates.

The keynote speaker, Joe Loya, told the graduates that, by seeking higher education, they created a future different from the one that their lives and circumstances seemed to dictate.

“You’re defeating your path,” said Loya, a playwright and essayist who spent seven years at a federal prison in Massachusetts. “You’ve moved closer to the world. And at this moment, the world has moved closer to you.”

A prison band, “Committed,” played a few R&B songs. Friends and family members, and a handful of the program’s 70 volunteer teachers, cheered them on. There were tears in remembrance of a friend who recently died, a fellow inmate who taught a plumbing course.

For some of the graduates, it was a heady mix of emotions.

“This here is a weird feeling,” said Carl Abdul Stewart, wearing a huge smile and a beaded necklace.

Stewart, 33, has been imprisoned for 16 years. He said he never saw education as important and was the first of his siblings to finish high school.

But his perspective has changed. After he saw someone in San Quentin get stabbed in the neck, he realized he wanted to find a way out. Encouraged by his cellmate and wife, Stewart became interested in learning.

“It took some growing up on Level Four,” he said, referring to a maximum security area. “This is not the life I want.”

Approximately 200 inmates are enrolled in classes and 68 have attained their degrees from Patten University in Oakland, said Jody Lewen, founder and executive director of the Prison University Project. Recently granted status as a nonprofit, the organization coordinates the program, from raising funds to acquiring donated textbooks.

The college program started at San Quentin in 1996, two years after the passage of a law that prevents prisoners from receiving federal Pell grants. It does not charge tuition for classes and the instructors – many of them professors and graduate students from the University of California at Berkeley, San Francisco State University and other local schools – are entirely volunteer.

One of their main goals is to help the men to lead healthy, safe and productive lives when they leave prison, Lewen said. “We want to give them the tools to become leaders and role models” – both inside and outside the gates of San Quentin.

If he’s released by the Parole Board in two years, Stewart wants to build a career speaking to young people.

“They’re out there killing themselves because they believe there’s no other way,” he said. “I want them to see it’s not too late.”

Edward Sprunck, 46, also has plans for his release in late 2008. With an associate’s degree under his belt, he has set his sights on acquiring a California real estate license.

His stepfather is pleased. “This is the first time I’ve ever heard him really be serious about going forward,” Andre Flandrois said. “Something good will come of this.”

Lewen said the program runs counter to the way many inmates think of themselves and that classroom learning opens them up to essential social skills like collaboration and debate.

“It ends up totally redirecting them,” she said. “The world is a different place because now there are all these options, possibilities, hope.”

Flandrois was struck by the sense of community he saw watching the men applaud one another.

“It’s almost like they’re graduating from Yale.”

Attribution: This originally appeared on Marin Independent Journal on June 28, 2007. Read Story

Please note that the Prison University Project became Mount Tamalpais College in September 2020.

Jody Lewen, who volunteered to teach inmates at San Quentin eight years ago, today heads the prison’s college program.

“I feel so strongly that everyone who is willing and able should be provided access to higher education,” said Lewen, director of the Patten University extension program at San Quentin. “I see this as a powerful opportunity to provide this access to people who would otherwise not have it.”

Lewen is the recipient of the 2006 Peter E. Haas Public Service Award given by the University of California at Berkeley, where she has a doctorate in rhetoric. She has a master’s degree in philosophy and comparative literature from Freie Universitt in Berlin.

She gave a lecture called “The Promise of Higher Education at San Quentin” during a ceremony at Cal’s Doe Library on Saturday.

Lila Blanco, associate director of university events, said Lewen was selected from 23 nominees.

Blanco said an eight-member committee felt Lewen best met the award criteria, which includes being a Cal alumnus who has made “a significant voluntary public contribution.” The award recognizes efforts illustrating the impact an individual can make through social change. The focus is on four areas: community service, health care, environmental work and education.

The most exciting thing about the award is the message it conveys that the university community is taking the issue of higher education for prisoners and the larger issue of the California criminal justice system seriously, and that is just good for everyone. It is good for the prison population and it is good for the state,” said Lewen, 42, of Berkeley.

San Quentin Lt. Eric Messick called Lewen a zealous professional who transformed the lives of many inmates.

“I have seen education turn the lives of many men around,” Messick said. “I have observed men who thought their only direction was criminal activity, through education and new forms of logic create a new reality for themselves. It all happened because Jody Lewen is zealous when it comes to promoting education for these men and because of all the volunteer instructors she brings in. Our appreciation goes out to them all.”

Lewen started as a volunteer teacher in the prison college program in 1999 – teaching English composition, literature and critical thinking – before taking over the program in 2000.

“By June, 68 students will have completed the associate of arts degrees, and hundreds others will have taken part in the program before returning to the community,” Lewen said.

She is executive director of the nonprofit Prison University Project founded in 2003.

“Its mission was to provide support to the college program at San Quentin because the program needed a budget, a vehicle to raise funds for textbooks and staff salaries,” Lewen said. “Over time, its mission has grown to become more involved with public education and advocating on issues related to reforming the criminal justice system.”

Attribution: This originally appeared on Marin Independent Journal on April 22, 2007. Read Story

Please note that the Prison University Project became Mount Tamalpais College in September 2020.