“I’m always thinking,” said Annabel Davis-Goff, director and co-founder of Bennington College’s Prison Education Initiative, “what would education look like for somebody who’s never going home?”
The Prison Education Initiative (PEI) was established in 2015 by Davis-Goff and David Bond to bring a college education to the prisoners of Great Meadow Correctional Facility, a maximum security men’s prison in Comstock, New York. Located roughly an hour north of Bennington, Great Meadow was chosen because—despite the prison’s inclusion of a school building, having been constructed as a juvenile facility—it formerly lacked an education program. “It’s considered to be the worst prison in New York state,” said Davis-Goff. “The Department of Corrections (DOCCS) will openly tell you that it’s the most violent and has the highest suicide rate. It’s geographically remote—there was nothing at Great Meadow, and there hadn’t been for a very long time.”
The PEI arose from a program called Incarceration in America, which hosted a series of conferences at Bennington where some of the leading voices in United States criminal justice and prison reform gathered to discuss topics including parole, imprisoned women, and education in prison. At one such conference, Davis-Goff was approached by JoAnne Page, former CEO of the Fortune Society—an organization dedicated to providing housing and services to formerly incarcerated people after release—who sparked the idea to establish an education initiative at Great Meadow. “Whenever JoAnne Page tells me to do something, I just do it,” Davis-Goff joked.
David Bond, a cultural anthropologist and Associate Director of the Center for the Advancement of Public Action (CAPA) at Bennington, formerly taught in the Bard College Prison Initiative. Bond and Davis-Goff began the process of establishing PEI, which required approval from the Department of Corrections, Great Meadow, and Bennington College itself.
PEI originally followed the model used by the Bard Prison Initiative (shortened to BPI, which is ironically why Bennington’s Prison Initiative could not use this acronym), but Davis-Goff and Bond soon realized that the PEI’s objectives would need to shift in order to accommodate the specific population at Great Meadow.
“We don’t measure success by degrees granted, and because so few of our students are released directly from Great Meadow, we don’t measure it by recidivism or employment, which are the usual metrics,” said Davis-Goff. An estimated one in four prisoners at Great Meadow is serving a life or virtual-life sentence (virtual life, as defined by The Sentencing Project, is a sentence of fifty years or more). “We place emphasis on offering education to lifers, but again: a degree, a job, or avoiding recidivism is not how you measure their success. It’s not how they measure it, either. A really serious student of history might take one course a term, but he wants to look into whatever he’s learning as deeply as he can.”
Davis-Goff highlighted that the goal of the PEI is “education for education’s sake,” a guiding principle that means as much to the program’s students as its faculty. For PEI students, classes are often the happiest time of the week.
There are currently 43 students enrolled in Bennington’s PEI. Classes occur once a week, and are three hours in length. Each term, at least one course is offered in math, literature, computer science, and social sciences. Architecture and drawing are offered most terms, and for the first time, chemistry is being taught: “We’re doing chemistry that doesn’t involve chemicals. Completely theoretical,” explained Davis-Goff. DOCCS restrictions limit which materials may be brought into the prison. “For instance, you can’t take a DVD into the prison because it can be weaponized. You can’t bring anything metal in. You aren’t allowed to bring any kind of maps, even maps of other countries. You can’t bring a calculator in—they can use them, but they have to be collected and put in a safe. Compasses.”
PEI started offering an associate’s degree soon after its inception and is now accredited to offer a BA; recently, an MFA program has also been introduced. Seven students at Great Meadow have been accepted into the MFA program so far, although PEI is still in the process of accreditation. Admittance into the BA program requires a Plan essay—albeit a more sophisticated version than the average Bennington sophomore’s Plan essay: “More like a Plan confirmation,” said Davis-Goff. She said that it has not been difficult to recruit faculty for PEI courses: in fact, faculty members who have taught at Great Meadow (besides Davis-Goff and Bond) include the current provost of Bennington College, Maurice Hall, former college president Elizabeth Coleman, and former Bennington professor Brooke Allen.
Inmates at Great Meadow first discovered the existence of the PEI via information displayed on posters or broadcasted on internal televisions, but since then, the primary route of communication has been word of mouth. “They don’t come in from the authorities telling them they can go to college. They come in from the other men telling them they could go to college. The men who work in what they call ‘industry’—they make soap for an outside company, for instance—a lot of those men told each other. As time went on, we got younger men, and people who had taken their GED in prison. When we had our first graduation, that made a huge impression on the whole prison.”
Davis-Goff said that the PEI’s impact has been palpable in the attitude and camaraderie of its students, who often enter the program discouraged and timid about expressing their opinions: “Very often, they require a lot of encouragement because they’re lacking in confidence. There’s a very strong community of students. Intellectual companionship—you can really see it. Students will come in who are really withdrawn, who can’t look up. It’s our job to give them enough confidence to start to contribute to class discussions. And of course, they do. You can see a physical change in the growing confidence and the way men sit and comport themselves. It’s a privilege to be allowed to do this.”
Popular disciplines for PEI students include math and literature, although course spots are not difficult to fill. “We have a lot of enthusiasm for math. Literature is very popular. The social science classes are always full when we do political science, or when David Bond does one of his anthropology courses. Obviously, everybody wants to be in the writing class. Everything that you offer, provided it seems accessible and people understand it, if they give it a chance and talk among themselves—they all fill up.”
Having a college degree upon release from prison can be vital. Davis-Goff explained that roughly two-thirds of people released from prison are rearrested within three years (often for a technical violation). For those who have a college education, however, the number falls drastically to below three or four percent. “If you were to count this financially, every dollar that you spend on prison education saves the taxpayer between four and five dollars,” said Davis-Goff, although she emphasized that this is not the primary way the success of prison education should be measured. “This is not the way that we sell our program, but it is a fact. Educated people don’t go back to prison.”
For the one-in-four prisoners at Great Meadow who are serving a life or virtual life sentence, however, the aim of education is different. Students must write a thesis for their associate’s degree: one student’s thesis drew a comparison between Barabara Ehrenreich’s book Nickel and Dimed and modern-day conditions, including the gig economy, the pandemic, and the reduction of unionization. Another student wrote about romanticism; yet another wrote about artificial intelligence in the field of medicine. One student is working on a math textbook for his thesis. In an environment where many prisoners will not be released, and where laws about prisoners’ publication are convoluted at best, projects such as these further emphasize the idea of education for education’s sake.
Davis-Goff spoke to the wider issue of mass incarceration in the United States, which far surpasses that of any other country. According to Prison Policy Initiative, a non-profit which produces data on mass criminalization, “every single U.S. state incarcerates more people per capita than virtually any independent democracy on earth.” New York, which has relatively progressive rates in comparison with other U.S. states, still incarcerates roughly three times as many people as the entire United Kingdom.
“Do you know that America has 4 percent of the world’s population, and almost 25% of its prisoners? The United States on average incarcerates 664 people per 100,000,” Davis-Goff said. “I come from Ireland. We incarcerate 67 people per 100,000.”
Image from Prison Policy Initiative
Mass incarceration in the U.S. stems from a host of issues, including sentences that are longer than other western countries, racial and ethnic disparities in the justice system, and the punishment of poverty. Private companies profit from numerous aspects of incarceration. “There’s a lot of money in incarceration. The people who make prison uniforms, prison guards, employment, bureaucracy, people who provide food to prisons, people who provide inadequate healthcare to prisons—those are often private,” said Davis-Goff.
Worth Rising, another non-profit organization which collects information about the private companies that profit from incarceration, have named well-known companies ranging from Amazon to Microsoft to Aramark.
“There are other countries that do this better,” said Davis-Goff. “There are fewer people in prison, they treat them better, and they have a lower recidivism rate. Prison is where the victims of every social service failure end up: prenatal health, housing, lead poisoning, inadequate medical care, poor schools, dangerous cities, drugs.”
“You’ve all got votes,” she said, when asked how change can be made on an individual level. “I don’t know that I really believe in single-cause voting, but pressure on politicians for reform—during the time I’ve been working around criminal justice reform, we have seen changes. We’ve seen dramatic changes, but not enough of them.”
The future of PEI partially depends on the future of Great Meadow. “There’s a possibility they’ll close the prison, because they’re going to close up to five prisons in New York state,” said Davis-Goff. She would like to introduce new courses in the future, such as music and religious studies, although PEI has not found a way to successfully teach music yet due to restrictions on objects like instruments. It is unlikely that PEI will operate at a women’s prison in the future due to the absence of any such facilities in the local area. PEI recently received a grant from the Mellon Foundation to investigate the state of continued education for prisoners serving life sentences.
When asked if there were challenges to working with PEI students, Davis-Goff laughed and said: “[They’re] much better than you lot are. Nobody would ever go back to teaching at the college after teaching there.”
In a place like prison, where people are stripped to the barest necessities of their humanity and defined by the darkest events of their past, education can be a crucial light at the end of the tunnel. PEI students carry a passion for learning which surpasses that of the average college student. “It is the happiest period in the week. They come into class; they talk about dignity; they talk about feeling as though they’re humans, not inmates. What they have to say matters,” said Davis-Goff. “It’s simply the most interesting thing I’ve ever done. And the most rewarding.”
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