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Join us for the Prison University Project’s First Annual Benefit: Gather & Give

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Purchase tickets here!

The Prison University Project will host an evening celebration Saturday, September 22, at the Delancey Street Restaurant in San Francisco, where we aim to spread awareness of our work and raise funds to increase our impact. Joined by board members, staff, volunteers, and former students, attendees will have the opportunity to learn more about the Prison University Project and hear about the program from recent graduates.

We will also be honoring two very important people from our community — Nigel Poor, the co-producer and co-host of Ear Hustle and volunteer instructor with the Prison University Project, and Jane E. Kahn, a civil rights and civil liberties attorney and founding board member.

Dinner and two drink tickets will be included.

Featuring spoken word performances by Cece Jordan and Tongo Eisen-Martin

Event Sponsors

Goldman Sachs

Jane E. Kahn and Michael Bien

Gay C. and Carl Grunfeld

David Raub

Lewen-Cooper Family Foundation

Kathy and Bob Richards

Heidi Richardson

Toby and Robert Rubin

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Host Committee

Eden Cooper

James Dyett

Bert Lewen and Roslyn Allison

Judy King

Connie Krosney

Melissa Nelken

Prison Law Office

Susannah Raub

Theresa Roeder

Maddy Russell-Shapiro

Rebecca Sills

 

We are also still seeking event sponsors and host committee members. If you’re interested in learning more about these roles, please email Lauren Hall at lhall@prisonuniversityproject.org.

The Delancey Street Restaurant is ADA accessible.

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

Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Aids Programs

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We are thrilled to announce that the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative will provide funding for the Prison University Project along with Ear Hustle, an award-winning podcast about life inside San Quentin.

You can read more about these partnerships in the San Quentin News — a publication that is produced, written, and published by people who are incarcerated in San Quentin.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) will provide grant funding to the Prison University Project (PUP) and Ear Hustle, an award-winning podcast. Both organizations are based at San Quentin State Prison.

PUP offers more than 350 inmates the opportunity to earn their Associate of Arts degree inside prison. Ear Hustle allows inmates to share their stories about what it’s like to live in prison on a daily basis.

“We are thrilled to support Ear Hustle’s efforts to connect with more listeners, and the Prison University Project’s plan to create new educational opportunities for people in San Quentin,” said Ana Zamora, criminal justice manager at CZI.

“These programs are breaking new ground by helping incarcerated people tell their own stories and make positive change in their own lives and in the world.”

In a statement, CZI said PUP “has been the site of a unique and unprecedented educational enterprise, providing excellent higher education to people at San Quentin,” and it acknowledged how the college program “supports increased access to higher education for incarcerated people across California.”

“The Prison University Project works to transform the U.S. criminal justice system by empowering incarcerated individuals to become leaders and change agents,” said Jody Lewen, executive director of PUP. The college program works “to break down harmful biases that dehumanize the image of incarcerated people in the public imagination.”

“The grant came in at an unbelievable time,” said Nigel Poor, co-host of Ear Hustle. “We didn’t have a big plan when we started. That’s only sustainable up to a point.”

Inmate and Ear Hustle co-host Earlonne Woods said the high-profile grant will show that their work is important. “Ear Hustle has to rely on grants,” he said. “I’m appreciative of CZI in assisting us in our struggles for funding.”

In October 2015, Dr. Priscilla Chan Zuckerberg and husband, Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, toured San Quentin to get a first-hand look at the programs inside the prison and to talk to inmates.

Aly Tamboura, who paroled from San Quentin in 2016, received his AA degree from PUP and learned computer coding in the Code.7370 program. He now works for CZI as its technology & program delivery manager and was instrumental in the grant funding going to PUP and Ear Hustle.

Poor, who is a tenured professor at California State University Sacramento, taught History of Photography at PUP in 2012 when she first met Tamboura, who was then an inmate-student. “He was a really good student,” she said. “He was really serious.”

After Tamboura paroled, he remained interested in the criminal justice system. While working for CZI, he proposed the idea of grant funding to organizations doing work to improve the criminal justice system.

Poor said she saw Tamboura at a Human Rights Watch conference, and then at a PUP brainstorming conference. Later, he escorted her into the CZI conference room in Palo Alto, California, to discuss a grant for Ear Hustle.

“It was wild,” Poor said. “It’s so uplifting that someone who was incarcerated is now responsible for funding Ear Hustle. If I hadn’t been teaching at PUP, I would’ve never made the connection.”

“A lot of people get out of prison and say what they’re going to do,” Woods said. He said Tamboura didn’t say he would do anything. “But he did. I’m just appreciative of a guy who looked back.”

“CZI’s generosity will allow us to grow in beautiful ways,” Woods said. “We usually hear about the great criminal justice reform work that groups like CZI do and only dream that this sequestered population could directly benefit … well, that dream has become a reality.”

Poor said she believes CZI wants to give voice to people who are voiceless. Through Ear Hustle, stories told by those living in prison are produced inside San Quentin and broadcast to the world with more than 12 million downloads.

In 2016, Ear Hustle won Radiotopia’s Podquest when it was chosen from more than 1,500 contestants from around the world, and it has been in the number one spot on Apple Podcasts.

The Prison University Project delivers the opportunity to the incarcerated to benefit from education in the liberal arts and to use their learning, talents and life experiences to make important academic and collective contributions. It provides training and mentorship to emerging educational programs that provide higher education in California and nationally.

In recognition of its impact and for providing education opportunities to the incarcerated, PUP was awarded the 2015 National Humanities Medal by President Obama.

At its 2018 graduation, Lewen said, “There are people out there that care about the things we care about.”

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is a philanthropic organization that is working to build a future for everyone. It uses traditional grant making, advocacy, storytelling, impact investing and engineering to help drive change at scale. Its criminal justice reform program focuses on power building in communities traditionally excluded from policy making and agenda-setting in criminal justice.

Attribution: This article originally appeared in the San Quentin News on July 30, 2018.
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Please note that the Prison University Project became Mount Tamalpais College in September 2020.

Foundations Announce 2018 Soros Justice Fellows

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We are thrilled to announce that Prison University Project alumni, Troy Williams and Tung Nguyen, were selected as 2018 Soros Justice Fellows, emerging leaders who are pushing for meaningful criminal justice reform in the U.S. Open Society Foundation’s press release is excerpted below:

The Open Society Foundations today announced an award of $1.4 million to its 2018 class of Soros Justice Fellows, an exciting group of community organizers, journalists, lawyers, policy advocates, and artists who seek to advance reform and spur debate on a range of issues facing the U.S. criminal justice system.

“Open society values face countless threats in this country, and those threats seem to be coming at a truly head-spinning pace,” said Lenny Noisette, who oversees the Soros Justice Fellowships for the Open Society Foundations’ U.S. Programs. “We’re fortunate to be able to support a group of people who will work to ensure that criminal justice reform remains front and center in debates about fairness and justice in this country—debates that have more urgency now than ever.”

Working in 10 states across the country, the 16 fellows in this year’s cohort include: a lawyer who will fight to make the effects of America’s harsh “three strikes” drug laws more transparent; two formerly incarcerated advocates who will provide legal support to their incarcerated peers; a transgender rights activist who will work to help transgender and gender nonconforming people tell their own stories of how the criminal justice system impacts their communities; and a former probation and parole officer who will now advocate for more humane probation and parole policies.

[…]

Tung Nguyen will establish a model Vietnamese deportation support system in Orange County, California, that can be implemented nationwide.

Troy Williams will create a nationwide multimedia platform and community engagement program that helps formerly incarcerated people document their experiences and engage the public.

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

Prison University Project Welcomes Three New Staff Members

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This spring, the Prison University Project welcomed three new staff members:

Jeanie Kirk, Grants Officer

Before joining the Prison University Project, Jeanie was a Senior Grant Writer with Julep Consulting, where she managed foundation fundraising applications for The Data Center, Louisiana Bucket Brigade, Foundation for Louisiana, the Vera Institute of Justice’s New Orleans Office, and Common Edge Collaborative, in addition to supporting the fundraising capacity of the Mississippi River Delta Restoration Campaign, and GNO, Inc. Her consulting work in New Orleans began with a focus on coastal resilience and restoration funding campaigns, but through building stalwart relationships with intersectional organizations, her work expanded to include writing in support of justice reform, racial reconciliation, data literacy, and social justice. She began her career in philanthropy in San Francisco with The Nature Conservancy’s California Chapter, where she served for four years as the Program Manager for the chapter’s Corporate and Foundation Relations team, a $30 million/year fundraising unit. Jeanie has an MA from Columbia University focused on climate change and sustainable development, and a BA in International Studies from the University of Richmond. She has traveled extensively and lived in Europe, India, and Latin America and is based in Portland, Oregon.

Derrius Jones, On-Site Program Coordinator

Derrius is a recent graduate of The College of Wooster in Ohio with a major in Africana Studies and a minor in Sociology. While in undergrad, he served as a student representative during administrative meetings to discuss improving student experience and sat on the board of the Diversity, Equity, and Strategic planning committee. He devoted his research to developing effective reentry methods and improving development for low income urban communities.

Jared Rothenberg, Development and Communications Associate

Before joining the Prison University Project, Jared worked as an educator for The Mosaic Project in Oakland, CA. Prior to that, he taught at a bilingual public school in Madrid, Spain and founded a nonprofit focused on environmental justice education in Providence, RI. Committed to radically inclusive, student-centered learning, he brings a passion for teaching, program coordination, and nonprofit development to this role. Jared earned a BA in History and Environmental Studies from Brown University.

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

Call for Paper Proposals—Academic Conference at San Quentin

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On October 5, the Prison University Project will host an academic conference at San Quentin State Prison in which incarcerated students and outside scholars will exchange ideas about “Corrections, Rehabilitation, and Reform.” This will be one of the few academic conferences ever held inside a prison in the U.S., and we are eager to broker a dialogue in which academic scholarship and those within the sphere of the criminal justice system support and improve one another.

In an era in which “rehabilitation” is increasingly rewarded but nevertheless difficult to quantify, in which prison populations increase at the same time as abolitionist movements intensify, and in which racial and economic injustice are prime contributors to prison overpopulation, it is urgent to generate new ideas. While many scholars outside of prison focus on just these questions, we posit that the answers are inadequate until incarcerated scholars are able to weigh in on the debates that shape their own lives and futures. This conference seeks solutions for the ills of the criminal justice system in the U.S. that came about in the 20th century. We believe that if incarcerated Americans come together with scholars from the outside, we might generate valuable debates and ideas about the direction that 21st century reform might take.

The Prison University Project has been running a college for people incarcerated at San Quentin State Prison since 1996. We run twenty classes each semester and have over 700 active students. The mission of the Prison University Project is to provide excellent higher education to people at San Quentin; to support increased access to higher education for incarcerated people; and to stimulate public awareness about higher education access and criminal justice.

Panels will range from the practical, to the theoretical, to the programmatic; possible topics may include, but certainly will not be limited to, the following:

Practical
-Social isolation and education
-The school-to-prison pipeline
-Educational goals and incarcerated students
-Social and cultural relevance in curricula and faculty training
-The place of technology in incarcerated spaces

Theoretical
-Socio-biology and criminal behavior
-Cognitive biases in the criminal justice system
-Communitarian, civil-society oriented approaches to incarceration
-The impact of prison higher education on individual and social behavior
-The impact of academic culture on social behavior and expectations

Programmatic
-The meaning of resilience
-Uses of technology in prison education
-The role of technology in alternatives to incarceration

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

Statewide Training on Higher Education in Prisons, March 18 – 20 2018

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The Prison University Project is pleased to host this statewide education and training conference for practitioners of in-prison higher education, as well as others who are interested in learning more about the field, March 18 – 20 at the Four Points by Sheraton Hotel in San Rafael.

Important links for attendees are below.

REGISTER FOR THE CONFERENCE.

BOOK YOUR HOTEL ACCOMMODATIONS.

FULL CONFERENCE AGENDA: Training Conference March 2018 Agenda

SITE VISIT SCHEDULE: Site Visit Schedule March 18 & 20

SAN QUENTIN RULES FOR VISITORS: SQ Rules for Visitors, 2018

 

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

President Obama Awards Prison University Project National Humanities Medal

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In recognition of our impact and our leadership in supporting educational opportunities for the incarcerated, the Prison University Project was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama in September 2016. Pictured above is President Obama with executive director Jody Lewen, operations manager David Cowan, and alumnus Pat Mims. The full text of the White House citation is below.

For transforming the lives of incarcerated people through higher education. Its programs offer opportunity and inspiration to their students, providing an example for others to emulate.

At one of America’s most notorious prisons, a corps of volunteer instructors is teaching inmates about the relationship between knowledge and freedom. The Prison University Project at San Quentin State Prison is the only on-site, degree-granting higher education program within California’s prison system.

Inside a trailer, the San Quentin students take classes taught by professors and graduate students from Bay Area colleges and earn college credits, tuition free. The San Quentin college program started in 1996 with two volunteer instructors, donated textbooks, and no budget, says Jody Lewen, executive director. She later founded a nonprofit to support the program, which is funded entirely through private donations.

Inside the prison, there is a waiting list for the program. Each semester about 350 San Quentin inmates take college and college prep classes in humanities, math, and social and physical sciences. To date, approximately 2,000 San Quentin prisoners have participated, with 150 receiving associate’s degrees from Oakland-based Patten University. Lewen compares the program to a small liberal arts college. Staffed by faculty from Stanford, University of California at Berkeley, San Francisco State, and other schools, it just happens to be inside a medium-security prison. Inside that stultifying environment, Lewen says, the program supplies the “oxygen” inmates need to imagine a different future. “Their sense of the world at large evolves,” she says. “They realize what they’re capable of.”

Among the program graduates is Pat Mims, who served 20 years for second-degree murder. Mims entered prison with a ninth grade education, and bounced around California prisons for a decade before transferring to San Quentin. Mims said his classes taught him to think critically and express his ideas. As a result, he says, “I started seeing a different way to live.” He recalls waking up at 3 a.m. to study in his cell before heading to his prison job as a clerk. “During the day I was thinking about the paper I was writing,” he says. “It helped me get away from prison while I was there.” After being released in 2009, Mims enrolled at San Francisco State University and began working for a social services organization, where he developed police protocols for assisting victims of human trafficking. More recently he’s been helping newly released prisoners obtain reentry services.

Currently Prison University Project serves only a fraction of San Quentin’s more than 4,000 inmate population. Lewen has hopes that it can be expanded, and also replicated elsewhere. The higher education program, Lewen said, is a model “of what you have to do if you want to include everyone and meet them where they are.”

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