San Quentin State
Prison in Marin County holds the distinction of being the oldest prison in the
state of California. It is also home to the state’s only on-site
degree-granting program for inmates: the Prison University Project[1].
The project has served around 1000 students since its founding in 1996.
Opportunities for
people experiencing incarceration seem to me like an excellent allocation of
state resources – the reality of the program is that it receives no funding
from the state and runs purely off of donations and volunteers.
I am planning to write a paper that treats
the topic of programs designed to provide incarcerated people the chance to
take academic classes. While I may also ultimately include a section on more
trade-oriented programming, I am more interested in the liberal arts as an
opportunity to those in prison. Ultimately, I think that this topic will be
inextricably linked to people who are imprisoned experiences as parents or not
as parents. Eleanor Novek and Stephen Hartnett’s book Working for Justice spends significant space considering the role
of parenthood in re-entry programs. Whether or not degree programs are re-entry
oriented might be a separate question, but it could ultimately end up being the
clearest question available. If so, considering the goals of students who
choose to participate in academic work during their time incarcerated will be a
central theme.
There are several
reasons that I hope to explore this topic. Incarceration affects a vast number
of people in the US – not only the people who are incarcerated, but also their
families. It is an institution that has the capacity to be incredibly
destructive; many people recidivise upon being released, or are unable to find
livelihoods and may lose their communities. Degree programs allow for inmates
to receive educational services that they might not have been previously
exposed to, and intuitively I feel that their existence is vital. While the
institution of imprisonment itself is subject to great question, especially its
existence and effects in the US, it seems unlikely that the institution will
disappear quickly – to that end, it seems that a small way to shift the prison
experience might be to add the potential for education and self-development via
degree programs.
I hope to examine
San Quentin and some of the ways on which its existence has evolved as a sort
of example for the transformations of US prisons in the last century. In recent
years, San Quentin has experienced vast overcrowding. There is a vast body of
work on three-strike and mandatory minimum sentencing that I hope to engage
with in considering how prisons have developed in recent years.
Some complications
I anticipate encountering are rather straightforward: this is a vast topic, and
while I hope that narrowing my scope to a regional one will make it more
accessible, it might be daunting.
Ideal primary literature:
-
Writings or memoirs that are public of people who have spent
time incarcerated and have shared their experience
-
Descriptions of curricula in degree programs
-
Activism and reform writing that comes from people who have
experienced incarceration and have incorporated their experience with it in
their careers, like Angela Davis and Michael Santos, among others
Secondary literature:
- Kaia Stern, Voices
from American Prisons: Faith, Education and Healing
-
Michelle Alexander, The
New Jim Crow
-
Literature offered by the Prison University Project on their
work https://prisonuniversityproject.org/mission/
-
Eleanor Novek & Stephen Hartnett, Working for Justice: A Handbook of Prison Education and Activism
-
Paula Johnson, Inner
Lives: Voices of African American Women in Prison
[1] “In San Quentin, Inmates Go To College”. http://www.npr.org/2011/06/20/137176620/inside-san-quentin-inmates-go-to-college
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