Joining the Fight: Colorado College’s Involvement in Correctional Education

Contemporary engagement in prisons by liberal arts colleges reimagines prison education. Numerous institutions have been receptive to the Bard Prison Initiative’s model. The combination of freedom, rigor, and beyond-the-sentence thinking for offenders has inspired those concerned about mass incarceration to teach skills useful to inmates after their release from prison. One example is the work of another private liberal arts institution, Colorado College, to raise awareness and broaden discourse around prison reform. Encouraged by the Bard Prison Initiative’s academic director, CC alumnus Jeffrey Jurgens, and emboldened by a generous grant for incarceration studies from two alumnae, Tori Winkler Thomas and Victoria Thomas, the college has with joined the fight to reduce recidivism.  The present website has been underwritten by the CC History Department’s Social Issues and Historical Contexts Initiative, made possible by the Thomas’s generosity.  Meanwhile the College is beginning the process of joining the Consortium for the Liberal Arts in Prisons based at Bard. Colorado College undergraduates raise awareness of incarceration through the student-organized Prison Project. Student researchers have crafted this timeline and the associated portfolio of studies of Colorado prisons. Colorado College is determined to contribute to national discussion of the contemporary crisis of incarceration.

As a BPI partner teaching in alliance with Pueblo Community College in local incarcerations facilities, CC’s will contribute to prison education through ten core standards. Three are central to prison education in the liberal arts tradition.[1] The first is that “academic standards in the prisons will be identical to those on the main campus sponsoring the program.” Student work will be comparable to that offered in the traditional liberal arts context.  Meanwhile, according to a second BPI standard, inmates will receive college credit for their work, incentivizing them to enroll in and complete courses. Finally, according to the paramount BPI-mandated standard—inmates will “develop intellectual skills” to engage with the depth and breadth of issues affecting the world outside prison walls.[2]

At this writing Colorado College is eager to work with Pueblo Community College and the state Department of Corrections in offering core humanities instruction at the Youthful Offenders System facility in Pueblo. Working locally, our institution joins the fight to remediate the national crisis of mass incarceration.

[1]“Consortium for the Liberal Arts in Prison Core Principals,” Bard Prison Initiative Ephemera n.d.

[2] Ibid.

Bibliography

Ephemera provided by BPI. “Consortium for the Liberal Arts in Prison Core Principals.” n.d.

[1] Ephemera “Consortium for the Liberal Arts in Prison Core Principals,” n.d.

[2] Ibid.