The prisoner is perhaps the most maligned figure in American society. The expansion of the prison industrial complex, and its acute emphasis on punishment instead of rehabilitation, deepens the discursive view that prisoners are inherently dangerous and irredeemable members of society.
Dubbed the “New Jim Crow” by Michelle Alexander, proliferating incarceration rates of Black men, and men and women of color at large, American prisons have devolved into punitive “systems of social control.” Law Scholar SpearIt calls the modern American penitentiary, “a locus of extreme violence, repression, and control,” where the mission of rehabilitating inmates is rapidly eroding.
Enter the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) – a largely private-funded college program for males imprisoned in the Eastern New York Correctional Facility. BPI currently has 300 men and women students enrolled in its program, which boasts a nationally heralded debate team. “By challenging incarcerated men and women with a liberal education, BPI works to redefine the relationship between educational opportunity and criminal justice,” holds the Program Mission.
On Friday, September 18th, BPI received national attention when three of its students – Carl Snyder, DyJuan Tatro and Carlos Polanco – defeated the Harvard Debate Team. The victory earned BPI, and the prison debate team, coverage in the Washington Post, and made them the focus of social media discussions and twitter trends nationwide.
However, the nod over Harvard was not the BPI Debate Team’s first high-profile victory. They defeated West Point, and outdebated “a nationally ranked team from the University of Vermont.” Without Internet access and immediate access to books, the debating trio of Snyder, Tatro, and Polanco evolved into a formidable debate team. Their achievement signaled the success of the BPI college program, established in 2001 to “give liberal-arts education to talented, motivated inmates;” and more broadly, the transformative yet diminishing commitment of prisoner rehabilitation.
Research indicates how prison rehabilitative paradigms, instead of punitive measures, lessen former inmate recidivism. BPI duly illustrates that finding. Leslie Brody writes that, “The Bard program’s leaders say that out of more than 300 alumni who earned degrees while in custody, less than 2% returned to prison within three years, the standard time frame for measuring recidivism.”
Equipped with formal educations and degrees, and the confidence and soft skills cultivated inside and outside of the BPI classroom, the Program prepares its students for life beyond bars. Punitive prison measures, conversely, only harden inmates and embed feelings of nihilism, which result in escalating recidivism and return-to-prison rates by former inmates. Within three years, roughly 67% percent of released prisoners were rearrested. After five years, the clip rose to approximately 77%.
Many foresee recidivism rates increasing with prison industrial complex becoming more privatized. Particularly with the financial incentives to hand down longer sentences, incarcerate and re-incarcerate inmates driving penitentiary bottom lines. As trends indicate, prisons in America are devolving into businesses where more punishment equals more profit.
While an aberration from this bleak trend, the BPI Debate Team’s victory over the Harvard College Debating Union offers a glimpse into what can be if dollars were pumped into rehabilitating, instead of punishing, our inmate population. Turning the structural tide toward rehabilitation and away from punishment, however, would be a victory for inmates everywhere.