Current Affairs

There are many ways to measure the disaster that is America’s prison system: the sheer, monstrous size of the captive population, the wildly disproportionate confinement of Black and brown prisoners, the recidivism rate, the prevalence of sexual assault, suicide and mental illness rates.

But the metric that has haunted me in the decade since I helped start the nonprofit The Marshall Project and began paying attention to the role of prisons in America is this: Each year more than 600,000 individuals are released from state and federal prisons. Far too many of them emerge from custody brutalized, alienated, estranged from their families, stigmatized and lacking in basic education or employable skills. Unsurprisingly, about three-quarters of those released from state prisons nationwide are arrested again within five years. California has one of the worst records for repeat offenses.

That’s why Governor Gavin Newsom’s ambitious new plan for San Quentin State Prison in California deserves national attention.

The more than 500 residents of death row — currently spared lethal injection by California’s moratorium on executions — will be transferred to other state prisons, and their housing unit, along with a prison warehouse, will be repurposed for education, job training, substance abuse therapy and other programs designed to make them safe neighbors. The prison is to be renamed the San Quentin Rehabilitation Center.

Over the past decade or so, corrections officials from several states have made pilgrimages to Europe — Norway is a favorite destination — to study a different philosophy of corrections. Obviously the United States is not Norway, a relatively homogeneous, oil-rich welfare state with an incarceration rate about one-tenth of ours. San Quentin’s roughly 3,000 inhabitants broadly match the population of all of Norway’s prisons put together. In contrast to the way most Americans understand the point of prison, to punish, to incapacitate criminals and to deter would-be offenders, progressive Europeans see a temporary loss of freedom not only as punishment for violating society’s rules but also as an opportunity that should not be wasted. Prison officers are taught that their mission is to diagnose the factors that led to criminal behavior and equip offenders to be law-abiding members of society. Prisons are more like walled campuses than cages, inmates are expected to get themselves to jobs or classrooms on schedule, and prison staff are more like social workers than sentries. Homicide and recidivism rates are remarkably low.

Several states, including Connecticut, Pennsylvania, North Dakota and Oregon, have launched experiments that borrow from European models emphasizing rehabilitation. These pilot programs have sometimes proved hard to sustain, let alone replicate, because staffing is more expensive, the original sponsors move on, budgets get cut and the innovators often encounter resistance from fear-mongering politicians and unions of corrections officers. San Quentin has proved to be fertile ground for reform.

Because the prison is embedded in affluent, liberal Marin Country, and because it has had some progressive wardens, it is rich in programs. When I visited in 2016, the prison had about 3,700 inmates and 3,000 volunteers, offering everything from Shakespeare to yoga and parenting classes to a computer coding program aimed at servicing nearby Silicon Valley. Prisoners publish an award-winning newspaper and produce an irresistible podcast called “Ear Hustle.”

Many American prisons, fearful of a political backlash if incarceration seems insufficiently punitive, offer at most some high school G.E.D. classes and manual labor training. San Quentin, attentive to the reality that upward of 90 percent of the incarcerated are eventually set free, endeavors to prepare its residents for a smooth re-entry to society. Last year its academic program became an accredited, degree-awarding junior college behind bars, Mt. Tamalpais College, the first of its kind in the country.

Mr. Newsom campaigned as a criminal justice reformer. On his watch the state has repealed some draconian sentencing policies, signed legislation banning private prisons, banned potentially lethal police chokeholds and halted executions. A successful re-engineering of San Quentin would add luster to Mr. Newsom’s progressive résumé should he, as many anticipate, make a run for the White House one day.

But he will have to navigate a narrow passage between skeptics on the punitive right and, on the left, his state’s chapter of the utopian prison abolition movement (who see any investment in prison reform as making a toxic system more palatable).

Moreover, the agency that oversees prisons, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, has not always been a brilliant steward of its domain. Under a 2011 Supreme Court order to reduce severe overcrowding, the state offloaded thousands of inmates to unprepared county jails, and many ended up in homeless encampments. Early in the Covid-19 pandemic, corrections officials sent more than 120 prisoners, some of them showing symptoms of infection, into San Quentin without adequate screening; 28 prisoners and a corrections officer died, a failure a judge called “morally indefensible and constitutionally untenable.”

So far Mr. Newsom has been vague about the details of this massive undertaking, but he has enlisted an impressive array of advisers to guide the project. I can think of 600,000 reasons to wish him success.

Bill Keller is the founding editor in chief of The Marshall Project and author of the book “What’s Prison For?” He has also been a correspondent, editor and op-ed columnist for The New York Times, and was the executive editor of The Times from July 2003 to September 2011.

Attribution: This article originally appeared in The New York Times on March 30, 2023. Photo courtesy of R.J. Lozada. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.

Kwabena Bediako, campus assistant chemistry professor, was awarded the National Science Foundation, or NSF, CAREER award for his ongoing research and outreach proposal.

The CAREER award is a five-year grant open to assistant professors who are fairly early on in their careers, Bediako noted. This grant will help him and his team continue their work with structural distortions in atomically thin materials, as stated in the NSF award abstract.

“With the solids that we work with, the layers can slide over each other, so it turns out that you can also control how they are twisted to each other,” Bediako said. “Even this twisting effect — the angle that you twist them at can significantly transform how the material behaves.”

Bediako uses electron microscopes at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to observe how atoms shift in order to make arrangements more stable. This work is useful because it could inform the development of the next generation’s technologies in computing and electronic devices, the NSF abstract stated.

Applicants submit a proposal that includes information both on their research and an idea for an outreach program, which is reviewed and scored, according to Bediako. The abstract added that in this way, proposals include efforts to develop more impactful research as well as initiatives that aim to broaden participation in STEM education and scientific research.

“We proposed to begin a scientific discussions section at Mount Tamalpais College, which is the higher institution at San Quentin State Prison,” he said. “The idea with this is to have a scientific discussion section with the students who happen to be incarcerated there and discuss basic scientific principles and new scientific discoveries.”

Bediako noted that the college has an analogous program for math and that some of his students already volunteer at the San Quentin State Prison. He hopes that the program will generate excitement about the topic among students there.

During the first year of the grant, which goes into effect on April 1, Bediako plans to work with personnel at the prison and college to come up with a plan for how to implement the program. He and his team will continue their research and implement the program in the second year.

“It was encouraging to me and the rest of my group to receive this award,” Bediako said. “It provides funding for us now to carry out this research that we are very excited about and also gives us a few resources to begin the program at San Quentin we’re excited about.”

Attributions: This article originally appeared in The Daily Californian on January 23, 2023. Photo courtesy of Kwabena Bediako. The grant will support both Bediako’s ongoing research and an outreach program through Mount Tamalpais College.

San Quentin is the oldest and most notorious prison in California. It’s home to the largest death row in the nation, housing infamous criminals including Charles Manson. But Governor Gavin Newsom has a new vision for the institution, renamed the “San Quentin Rehabilitation Center”. Under his plan, the nearly 550 condemned inmates would move to other maximum security facilities in the state. With a proposed initial infusion of $20 million, San Quentin would aim to increase its rehabilitation programming 10 fold and incorporate methods used in Scandinavian countries to normalize life, emphasize support over punishment, and prepare inmates for their eventual return to society.  Forum talks about the governor’s transformative vision and the challenges in making it happen.

Guests:

Anita Chabria, columnist, Los Angeles Times

Tinisch Hollins, executive director, Californians for Safety and Justice; co-founder, SF Black Wall Street; Vice Chair, SF African-Americans Reparations Advisory Committee

(Mount Tamalpais Collge Alumni) Thanh Tran, policy associate, Ella Baker Center for Human Rights

Attributions: This article originally appeared on KQED on April 3, 2023. Photo courtesy of R.J. Lozada.

California’s infamous San Quentin State Prison is headed for a major transformation as Gov. Gavin Newsom advances his efforts to remake the state’s penal system. Newsom is scheduled to visit the 171-year-old penitentiary Friday and detail plans to shift it from a maximum-security facility to a center for education and training within the prison system, according to his press office. In a statement Thursday, Newsom called the prison’s impending evolution “a new model for safety and justice — the California Model — that will lead the nation.”

San Quentin, which houses about 3,300 inmates, would be the largest facility of its kind in the nation, Newsom said. Located on a peninsula in Marin County north of the Golden Gate Bridge, San Quentin is California’s oldest prison and was once home to the nation’s largest Death Row. Under the governor’s plan, the facility will be renamed “San Quentin Rehabilitation Center” and an advisory group of rehabilitation and public safety experts will lead the transformation.

It was not immediately clear how long that process would take. But the reimagined facility will incorporate more holistic, Scandinavian incarceration models, according to Newsom’s administration. Any remaining Death Row inmates will be transferred to other prisons in the state. The 2023-24 budget proposal released by the governor in January allocates $20 million to commence the project. The legislature must approve funding for the effort. While it was not immediately clear the extent of changes that would occur at storied correctional facility, justice reform advocates commended the governor’s intentions.

“By transforming San Quentin into a place that promotes health and positive change, California is making a historic commitment to redefining the institution’s purpose in our society,” Brie Williams, professor of Medicine at the UCSF Center for Vulnerable Populations, said in a statement. “I look forward to lifting the voices of people who have lived or worked in prisons to imagine a center for healing trauma, repairing harm, expanding knowledge, restoring lives, and improving readiness for community return.”

The reimagining of the facility marks the latest in a series of steps by the governor to shift California’s incarceration system away from punishment and toward rehabilitation — one of his original campaign promises. Over the last four years, Newsom has placed a moratorium on the executions of thousands of death row inmates. He signed a law aimed at reforming the state’s juvenile justice system and ended the state’s use of private, for-profit prisons.

He’s also pushed California’s correctional department to embrace methods used in Norway and other Scandinavian nations, which rehabilitate inmates by trying to normalize life, emphasizing services and support over punishment. San Quentin would not be California’s first penitentiary modeling such an approach. At Valley State Prison in Chowchilla, inmates are already experiencing the philosophy first-hand. The facility has a garden, barbecue pit and more comfortable furniture, according to a recent story in The Bee. Norway’s model is not only seen as an improvement for inmates but also for correctional officers. Nearly a third of California correctional officers have at least one symptom of PTSD, 38% report symptoms of depression and 10% entertain suicidal thoughts, according to a 2018 study from the University of California, Berkeley.

Meanwhile, in Norwegian prisons, officers report high levels of job satisfaction and well-being. They are trained to build relationships with inmates and to use the lowest levels of force when approaching potentially confrontational situations.

San Quentin was a different place when Daniel Silva was an inmate there in the 80s. “It was horrible,” he said. “There was a lot of violence.” The prison has a legacy of violence, including a 1971 escape attempt that left three inmates and three guards dead. San Quentin has also been the site of 422 executions, starting with hangings in 1893, the gas chamber beginning in 1938 and later lethal injection. In 2019, following a slew of legal challenges over the years, Newsom issued an executive order that halted further executions. He later shuttered the prison’s death chamber.

But over the years, Silva said he has seen the notorious penitentiary undergo major changes and invest in programming to improve the experiences of its inmates. San Quentin offers several nationally-recognized programs and services for its inmates. The prison is home to an award-winning inmate-produced newspaper, as well as the first podcast created and produced in prison, Ear Hustle. It also has its own accredited liberal arts degree program within the prison confines called Mount Tamalpais College. The college currently serves about 300 inmates at no cost to the students and has awarded more than 200 degrees, according to college founder and President Jody Lewen.

After spending more than 20 years behind bars, Silva now runs a Sacramento-based nonprofit called Self Awareness and Recovery, which helps prevent and divert youth from entering the state’s prison system and assisting inmates returning home after their release. He’s hopeful that the governor’s announcement will lead more inmates to find their purpose like he did and prepare them to pursue a better life upon release. “I think the governor is making good choices as far as fixing things,” Silva said. “These types of reforms have to take place if a change is really going to happen.”

Attributions: This article originally appeared in Sacramento Bee on March 17, 2023. Photo courtesy of R.J. Lozada.

W/A’s Ashley Gaddis interviews Bonaru Richarson, former editor-in-chief of the San Quentin News and member of the development team at Mount Tamalpais College, the only accredited college in the U.S. located within a prison.

Richard “Bonaru” Richardson is a communications associate on the development team at Mount Tamalpais College (Mt. Tam College), the only accredited college in the US that is located within a prison, located at San Quentin State Prison in California. A graduate of Mt. Tam, Richardson was hired for the job after serving 23 years behind bars. As many formerly incarcerated people can attest, the path from release to employment isn’t an easy one. However, Richardson had a few resources that many others are left without—a support system and training. Both of these elements were introduced to Richardson during his work on the San Quentin News, a newspaper run by incarcerated people at San Quentin, where he cultivated a variety of highly valuable workplace skills and took on leadership responsibilities as the paper’s editor-in-chief. 

In a recent conversation about the impact that his experience leading the San Quentin News had on his personal growth, Richardson draws on his own experiences with incarceration and reentry, offering insights into educational and work-based programs that can help improve outcomes for returning citizens upon their release. 

Ashley Gaddis: Bonaru, how did you become interested in working on the San Quentin News?

Bonaru Richardson: I was heavily inundated with the gang environment before and during my time in prison. My future was based on what happened the next day and not much further so I never indulged in the possibility of other opportunities. When I hit the level four yard (maximum security in California prisons) that’s when it dawned on me that I need to start changing my life because I started seeing real gang members who were really lost and given up hope in life—and I didn’t see myself giving up hope to the point where I didn’t want my life anymore. I started thinking about my children. My kids were around five, six, and 7 years old at the time and they started asking questions that I couldn’t answer. I wanted to be there for them. 

That’s what got me started with education—when one of the instructors told me I should go to the vocational program. They were thinking about my reentry before I even had a vision of what reentry might look like.

I knew that if I ever had the opportunity to be released from prison, I didn’t want to go back into society the way that I’d been released previously. I didn’t have transferable skills back then and didn’t care to learn any skills. I knew this time I had to be a little bit more responsible so I started looking into my options and the vocational program was one that I thought I could fall back on. 

AG: Tell me about your work on The San Quentin News and how you got started working on the paper.

BR: The San Quentin News was just coming back into existence in 2008, and I was in a vocational training class printing the newspapers at that time. I was the only person printing the paper at that time, so I had to take on a leadership role with the guys who put the newspaper together—writing it and learning to be responsible enough to get the newspaper printed on time.

My first role was as the traffic manager. I was delivering the newspapers from one unit to the next. I eventually ended up cleaning toilets every morning, making the coffee, and getting everybody’s desks and things ready for when they came into the newsrooms early in the morning. We were usually the first ones there and the last ones to leave. And oddly enough, that behavior stuck with me all the way through the time I became editor-in-chief. In that role, I wanted to teach people some responsibility. I wanted to make sure that anybody who wanted to come work on a newspaper had a GED—you basically can’t work in America without one. So I pushed them to learn on the job and go get a GED and then I pushed them to get into the college program.

AG: What kind of skills did you develop in the newsroom?

In terms of transferable skills, working in the newsroom gave me more than you can possibly imagine. I learned how to utilize Adobe Creative Suite, everything in there from Photoshop to Illustrator to InDesign. All of these skills culminated into something that I wish I would’ve had before I thought about going down the wrong path.

When I was on the newspaper staff, I used to look up to Arnulfo Garcia (former San Quentin News editor-in-chief),  Michael Harris (co-founder of Death Row Records and former San Quentin News editor-in-chief), and Aly Tamboura (now Director of Strategic Initiatives at the Anti-Recidivism Coalition). I appreciated them and the way that they commanded a room and the way that they were always responsible for their duties. As I watched them, I started taking down those antisocial bricks I had built up. These little nuances that people might take for granted taught me the things that I should have learned at an early age. I probably would not have ended up in prison had I known them earlier but it was a recovering addict (referring to Garcia) who taught me responsibilities—imagine that. Arnulfo Garica was a real man and father, not just a recovering addict. 

AG: Describe some of the most significant challenges that people face once they’re released.

BR:  First and foremost, before they even get released, they have to have it in their mind already that they want to change and they want to be productive in society—that has to start while you are in prison. It’s preparation. A lot of individuals know they will be released and they don’t think ahead. They’re gonna smoke weed, and drink white lightning (alcohol made in prisons) until the day they go home. The way it’s set up, people aren’t taught to be responsible while they’re incarcerated. You have room and board, you’re fed and clothed, and then you’re pushed into life with $200, told to enjoy the rest of your life, and don’t come back, or you’ll be back. That’s usually the standard message. 

A lot of people are going to take that $200 and go get alcohol, drugs, or whatever else. So that’s why I say that it starts before you even get out of prison. To be successful in reentry, the mind is what has to change first, then your attitude. It’s a mental struggle for a lot of individuals, but once they figure it out, then they’re ready to give back, make amends and be willing to ask for real help.

AG: What about your experience at San Quentin do you feel set you up for success upon release? What should other institutions think about?

BR: The carceral system is broken in so many ways that it’s hard even to say where to start. But these institutions can be transformed into proper management facilities. If it wasn’t for the administration at San Quentin, I don’t think I would’ve changed. I had been in 10, maybe 15 prisons. San Quentin worked because the administration allowed programs like Mount Tamalpais College and San Quentin News. The administrations also talk to you, while others put punishment on top of punishment despite the promise of rehabilitation suggested by the name CDCR (California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation).

If you’re going to invest in anything, it should be people. Invest in making sure that the survivors are healed, and incarcerated individuals understand their role in the harm they caused to society. Just because people are in prison, it doesn’t mean that they don’t have the potential for growth and change. People need a support system in those institutions that can talk to individuals about what they can expect when they leave prison. It’s the fundamental things in life that people need to understand so they can take steps like filling out a job application, saving money, and paying bills. And when they can do that, they start getting a sense of pride. I can pay my taxes. I can vote. Because of those things I began to think “maybe I’m a part of this society.” 

Attribution: This article originally appeared in Whiteboard Advisors, in November 2022. Photo courtesy of Whiteboard Advisors.

Reason 55 is a podcast hosted by law enforcement veteran, Stephen B. Walker, each episode of Reason 55 will bring together diverse and determined people doing incredible work that helps to affect our world for the better. Reason 55 gives a mic to voices from invisible operations that touch lives every day and features discussions that provide listeners with different perspectives and prescriptions to be an Evolution of Hope.

David Luis “Suave” Gonzalez was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole when he was 17. In many states—including Pennsylvania, where Gonzalez was sentenced—there are few, if any, college opportunities for people with such lengthy sentences. 

Still, Gonzalez eventually fought his way into Villanova University’s privately funded college program at Graterford Prison, the maximum security facility where he was incarcerated. There he earned a bachelor’s degree in education and marketing.

While incarcerated, Gonzalez developed a decades-long friendship with journalist Maria Hinojosa. The two would later work together to document his time in prison and subsequent release, in 2017 after a Supreme Court decision that ruled automatic life sentences without parole for juveniles as unconstitutional, in an eponymous podcast, Suave, which won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize. 

Now, Gonzalez is a support coach with I Am More, a reentry program for formerly incarcerated students at Philadelphia Community College. He also co-hosts Death by Incarceration, which will be featuring episodes this fall focused on the various ways people in prison get an education. 

In August, journalist Rahsaan “New York” Thomas called Gonzalez from a phone booth on the ground tier of San Quentin’s North Block. Thomas, who was sentenced to 55-years-to-life in California, is the inside host of the Pulitzer-nominated podcast Ear Hustle. 

Like Gonzalez, Thomas was able to earn a degree behind bars. As he wrote for Open Campus, it was one of the factors cited in the commutation he received from California Gov. Gavin Newsom earlier this year. At the end of September, Thomas got word that he is suitable for parole following Newsom’s clemency and he expects to go home sometime in early 2023.  

Thomas and Gonzalez talk about fighting the system and the role of education in prison when you think you’re never getting out.

Read New York’s interview with Suave here. We co-published the story with Slate.

To listen to the entire conversation between Thomas and Gonzalez, check out this episode of Death by Incarceration.

Attribution: This article originally appeared in Open Campus, College Inside on Oct. 20, 2022.  Photo/Rahsaan “New York” Thomas and David Luis “Suave” Gonzalez both graduated from college while serving a life sentence in prison. Illustration by Charlotte West/Open Campus. Photo of Thomas by Eddie Herena. Photo of San Quentin by Shutterstock.

Clearing a final hurdle

One of our College Inside contributors got big news: Rahsaan “New York” Thomas, the inside host of the Ear Hustle podcast out of San Quentin, got word that he is going home in about 5 months. He cleared the last big hurdle last week when the California parole board signed off on Governor Newsom’s clemency.

Even though Rahsaan finished his associate’s degree – one of the factors cited by Newsom’s office as a reason for granting clemency  – in 2020, he also just celebrated his graduation in June. (Rahsaan recently wrote about his winding journey to a college degree for The Marshall Project.)

Don’t miss Rahsaan’s story we published earlier this year on why education matters for people serving extreme sentences. He’s also helping to build a prison-to-journalism pipeline with his non-profit, Empowerment Avenue.

“For those of us serving long sentences, recidivism rates and jobs can’t measure the success of our college education,” Rahsaan writes. “My pursuit of a degree started in 2016, approximately 16 years into a 55-years-to-life sentence. I would have to live to be 85 years old to evaluate whether an associate’s degree will break the cycle of incarceration that’s circled my adulthood.”

Attribution: This article originally appeared in Open Campus on Sept. 9, 2022.  Photo/R.J. Lozada

In January 2022, after an arduous 18-month application and review process, Mount Tamalpais College was granted Initial Accreditation by the Accrediting Commission for Junior and Community Colleges, making it the first accredited independent liberal arts college dedicated specifically to serving incarcerated students.

Operating out of San Quentin State Prison — the oldest operating correctional facility in California, tucked away on a peninsula just outside of San Francisco — the staff at Mount Tamalpais has long been dedicated to ensuring that students on the inside receive a high-quality education at least comparable to what they might receive at a quality educational institution on the outside. 

Along with providing “an intellectually rigorous, inclusive Associate of Arts degree program and College Preparatory Program, free of charge, to people at San Quentin State Prison,” Mount Tamalpais also seeks to “expand access to quality higher education for incarcerated people, and

to foster the values of equity, civic engagement, independence of thought, and freedom of expression,” according to its website.

NationSwell Council member Jody Lewen, the founder and president of Mount Tamalpais College, recently sat down with us to talk about advocating for academic quality and inclusivity and the process of building Mount Tamalpais’s programs into what they are today — a process, she said, that “really strained my atheism.”

Read our full interview with Jody below:

NationSwell: Tell us a little bit about how you ended up working in prison education.

Jody Lewen, founder and president of Mount Tamalpais College: I grew up in Manhattan and went to Wesleyan in Middletown, Connecticut, for undergrad, and then a short time later moved to Berlin and ended up doing my Master’s in comparative literature and philosophy. I came to California in 1994 to do my doctorate at Berkeley, but while I was about halfway through working on my dissertation, I very coincidentally learned about this college program at San Quentin that was run entirely by volunteers and became very interested.

I knew nothing about prison, it was not a field I had read about or studied. I had done a lot of political work and read a lot of history and literature as an undergrad and was very aware, in a mostly abstract sense, of suffering in the world, but I really hadn’t found a way to integrate my political interests with my academic career path. But I thought the program sounded really interesting, so I ended up going into San Quentin in the spring of 1999 and teaching a public speaking class and really loving it.

NS: What were some of the early challenges or surprises you faced in doing this work?

Mount Tamalpais College’s Jody Lewen: It was a lot of my own demons about education — there were so many very humbling ironies. I had never interacted with adults who were as talented and intelligent whose basic skills in reading and writing were as poor, and it made me realize that I had a lot of ignorant assumptions about the correlation between basic skills and intellect.

When I got that first batch of papers back, I didn’t even know how to grade them, because there were so many problems. So I eventually went back and had a conversation with the students where I said look, guys, I’m realizing there’s all this stuff you haven’t been taught about college writing and I’m not sure how to handle this but I don’t really feel comfortable letting this stuff slide.

They just overwhelmingly were like, ‘Please don’t patronize us, people have been underestimating us our entire lives.’ They didn’t want to be in a prison college program; they wanted to be in college, and they wanted to learn what they really needed to know to be successful in the outside academic and professional worlds. 

NationSwell: How did you go from working as a volunteer at San Quentin to becoming the founder and president of Mount Tamalpais?

Lewen: I had gotten very interested in the recruitment and training of faculty because very early on I had become aware that they were not acquiring the basic skills they were going to need to be successful in a rigorous academic environment. It became a question of, should the standards we’re holding our students to on the inside be the same ones we’re holding our students to on the outside? And if not, why not?

I’m the most unreligious person to walk the face of the earth, and yet a series of things began happening that really strained my atheism. It was like an intervention: We started to realize that the problem was not just that they were so underprepared academically; the problem was us, it was that we didn’t have the resources or the time to build a program that really met their needs.

And then the fellow who was running the program left, and the whole thing collapsed on me like a house. I began to tear out walls and floors and ceilings; our courses weren’t in compliance with the minimum number of contact hours, so I extended the semester from 10 weeks to 13 weeks, increased the class meetings to twice a week from once a week, and began to recruit teachers who knew how to teach developmental writing and math. And we basically overhauled the whole pre-college writing and math program.

NationSwell: What are some of the things you think about in trying to recruit new educators to meet these challenges?

Lewen: To be frank, most people assume that prison is a scary place to be, understandably. We’ve all been taught to imagine incarcerated people as ugly, predatory, not very bright. So getting people to overcome their physical fear of prison is huge. It helps a lot, as the program has grown, we have so many current and former faculty members who can’t stop talking about what it’s like to teach there, and they’re really our recruitment army. 

And then the other thing I’ve noticed is that the universe of people who are interested in prisons and serving the incarcerated are often relatively politically similar to each other. The Bay Area is obviously quite progressive, so cultivating intellectual diversity among the faculty can be quite challenging. I take really seriously the fact that our students are really diverse in every way —

not just racially or ethnically but also culturally, ideologically, politically, they’re from all corners of the universe. So diversity is also an important value in our recruitment processes.

NationSwell: What can interested members do to help support the work that you do, or prison education more broadly?

Lewen: For the fall semester our instructors are mostly lined up already, but in general we’re always looking for volunteers. For the credit classes the lead instructor has to have at least a master’s degree in the field, but for the developmental education classes and also any tutoring roles, the requirements are a little bit more flexible. [Anyone interested in volunteering can get in touch through Mount Tamailpais’s website here.]

We’re  always looking to connect with individual and institutional funders who are excited about the idea of providing high quality educational opportunities to currently incarcerated people. Unlike traditional colleges, we charge no tuition and receive no state or federal funding. This is fantastic for preserving our autonomy and our capacity to innovate, but it’s also real work to raise $5 million a year. People can always reach out to us, or directly support our work at mttamcollege.org/donate. 

There are also other nonprofit organizations that support reentry and other ancillary fields that can always use volunteers.A number of excellent organizations in the Bay Area have been founded by our alumni, either while they were still inside or once they got out. Some of those organizations are:

• Bonafide (bonafidelife.org), an amazing reentry organization that works with people from the moment they’re released and then stays with them throughout their lifetime helping them adjust and thrive. 
• The San Quentin News, the prison newspaper that’s in a period of tremendous growth right now.
• Mend Collaborative, a restorative justice organization that was recently co-founded by an alumnus of ours.
• Veterans Healing Veterans, founded by a former student, which supports currently or formerly incarcerated veterans.
• Ear Hustle, a podcast that was co-founded by a former MTC faculty member.

Attribution: This article originally appeared in NationSwell, August 29, 2022.