After 20+ years of teaching, it is a remarkable experience to find your true teaching voice inside a maximum-security prison! Yet at Sing Sing prison in NY and at Graterford in PA, where currently I am teaching history for Villanova University, my experience has been reaffirmed over and over again. Both Mercy College in Dobbs Ferry, NY, and Villanova offer (privately funded) degree programs to the men in both prisons. Consistently the men in these highly selective programs are talented, dedicated and appreciative.
More importantly, to date at Sing Sing, not one inmate, released with a college degree, has returned to prison, inspiring the recent documentary Zero %. Certainly higher education in prison is one of the answers to the horrible problem of mass incarceration, especially of Black males - in US prisons, which justifiably some have labeled the new Jim Crow. To those who object to these programs -- and there are many -- the former New York State Commissioner of Corrections once said: “ Would you rather have them out educated of uneducated?”
For more see www.hudsonlink.org.
Marjorie Jones, Author, Philadelphia PA
For more see www.hudsonlink.org.
Marjorie Jones, Author, Philadelphia PA
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